"The macroeconomic development of most major industrial economies is characterised by boom-bust cycles. Normally such boom-bust cycles are driven by specific sectors of the economy. In the financial meltdown of the years 2007-2009 it was the credit sector and the real-estate sector that were the...

We study the interaction between borrowers' and banks' solvency in a quantitative macroeconomic model with financial frictions in which bank assets are a portfolio of defaultable loans. We show that ex-ante imperfect diversification of bank lending generates bank asset returns with limited...

Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and stave off bank runs. However, as the experience of some European countries, most notably Ireland, has demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees is...

Investment banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Risk management infrastructure facilitates the safe pursuit of profits and the balancing of associated risks. By 2006, Lehman Brothers was thought to have a very respectable risk management system, and even its regulator, the...

We examine the mechanism through which a financial crisis affects the default risk of real economy firms. We find that firms with strong dependence on bank financing suffer from higher increases in default risk than firms with no such dependence. Conversely, firms that rely solely on financing...

We study financial networks and reveal a new kind of systemic risk arising from what we call default ambiguity, i.e., a situation where it is impossible to decide which banks are in default. Specifically, we study the clearing problem: given a network of banks interconnected by financial...

What determines the price of insurance against default of advanced economies? Our laboratory to answer this question is the credit default swap (CDS) market on government debt of 18 advanced economies. The price of credit protection on these countries shows a strong degree of co-movement, has...

We propose a novel systemic risk measurement model based on stochastic processes, correlation networks and conditional probabilities of default.For each country we consider three different economic sectors (sovereigns, corporates, banks) and we model each of them as a linear combination of two...