[...]We address several questions in this paper. First,how could macro markets be useful to the average person?Second, how large are the potential benefits from diversificationif these markets were to be introduced andused optimally? Third, can existing financial marketsachieve a similar degree...

[...]This article examines how Japanese exporters areresponding to the conflicting objectives of maintainingstable profit margins and stable export sales when the valueof the yen fluctuates. We find that Japanese firms tend tostrike a balance between these goals. The firms’ foreigncustomers do...

[...]The most obvious possible, and undesirable,impact on bank behaviour of risk-weighted capital requirementsis that excessive differentials in the weights appliedto different categories of assets might induce banks to substituteaway from highly risk-weighted assets. In the early1990s, U.S....

[...]This paper examines the impact that the PCAstandards had on bank portfolios following the passage ofFDICIA in 1991. To do this, the simultaneous equationsmodel developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992), and latermodified by Jacques and Nigro (1997) to study the impactof risk-based capital, is...

Advocates of fair value accounting believe that fair valuesprovide more relevant measures of assets, liabilities, andearnings than do historical costs. These advocates assertthat fair value accounting better reflects underlying economicvalues. The advantages of this method—and thecorresponding...

Bank supervisors have long recognized two types of shortcomingsin the Basle Accord’s risk-based capital (RBC)framework. First, the regulatory measures of “capital” maynot represent a bank’s true capacity to absorb unexpectedlosses. Deficiencies in reported loan loss reserves, forexample,...

This paper describes a new and intuitive methodfor answering these technical questions by tabulating theexact loss distribution arising from correlated credit eventsfor any arbitrary portfolio of counterparty exposures, downto the individual contract level, with the losses measuredon a...

Liberalization and deregulation have recently accelerated.It is therefore useful to keep risk within a certain level inrelation to capital, considering that financial institutionsmust control their risk appropriately to maintain thesafety and soundness of their operation. In 1988, the...

In August 1996, the U.S. bank regulatory agenciesadopted the market risk amendment (MRA) to the 1988Basle Capital Accord. The MRA, which became effectivein January 1998, requires that commercial banks withsignificant trading activities set aside capital to cover themarket risk exposure in their...

Set forth below in Part I is a discussion of the backgroundof the Pilot; in Part II, conclusions arising out of the conductof the Pilot; and in Part III, the Participating Institutions’views as to the next steps. The Pilot left the ParticipatingInstitutions with three core conclusions:• that...