Leverage entails a unique set of risks, such as margin calls, which can force investors to liquidate securities at adverse prices. Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) fails to account for these unique risks. Investors often use portfolio optimization with a leverage constraint to mitigate the risks of...

Conditional value at risk (CoVaR) and marginal expected shortfall (MES) have been proposed as stock return based measures of the systemic risk created by individual financial institutions even though the literature provides no formal hypothesis test for detecting systemic risk. Our conclusion is...

This paper introduces a model of endogenous network formation and systemic risk. In it, strategic agents form networks that efficiently trade-off the possibility of systemic risk with the benefits of trade. Efficiency is a consequence of the high risk of contagion which forces agents to...

We report a study of a stylized banking cascade model investigating systemic risk caused by counterparty failure using liabilities and assets to define banks' balance sheet. In our stylized system, banks can be in two states: normally operating or distressed and the state of a bank changes from...

This paper empirically analyses the determinants of banks’ systemic importance. With applying a novel measure on the systemic importance to US bank holding companies in 2000–2010, we show that size is an important determinant of systemic importance, but banks with size above a certain...

We study experimental coordination games to examine through which transmission channels, and under which information conditions, a panic-based depositor-run at one bank may trigger a panic-based depositor-run at another bank. We find that withdrawals at one bank trigger withdrawals at another...

When banks choose similar investment strategies, the financial system becomes vulnerable to common shocks. Banks decide about their investment strategy ex-ante based on a private belief about the state of the world and a social belief formed from observing the actions of peers. When the social...

Rate setting methods for crop yield and revenue contracts employ methods that presume that correlations are state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress then diversification opportunities for private insurers...

This article inves tigates the time evolution of the integra tion of derivative markets through the graph-theory. We focus on three categor ies of underlying as sets : energy and agricultural products , as well as financial assets . Integration is seen as a necessary condition for systemic risk...

In the first part of this thesis, we introduce a new methodology for stress-test exercises. Our approach allows to consider richer stress-test exercises, which assess the impact of a modification of the whole distribution of asset prices’ factors, rather than focusing as the common practices...