Search Results
Working Paper
A coherent framework for stress-testing
In recent months and years both practitioners and regulators have embraced the ideal of supplementing VaR estimates with "stress-testing". Risk managers are beginning to place an emphasis and expend resources on developing more and better stress-tests. In the present paper, we hold the standard approach to stress-testing up to a critical light. The current practice is to stress-test outside the basic risk model. Such an approach yields two sets of forecasts -- one from the stress-tests and one from the basic model. The stress scenarios, conducted outside the model, are never explicitly ...
Journal Article
Assessing supervisory scenarios for interest rate risk
A new proposal by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for setting the amount of capital banks must hold against potential losses from interest rate risk uses only a few, very stylized scenarios. Analysis shows the proposed scenarios are extremely unlikely to occur. While they may be appropriate for setting bank capital guidelines, they are much less relevant for everyday risk management. Instead, using a modeling framework with a plausible range of interest rate scenarios would be more relevant to help banks manage their interest rate risk.
Journal Article
Disentangling diverse measures: a survey of financial stress indexes
The recent financial crisis helped emphasize the need for measures of financial conditions. In the wake of the crisis, several researchers and institutions?both private sector and central bank?developed measures of financial stress. These measures are intended to capture, among other things, the liquidity in financial markets and potentially forecast changes in real economic conditions. Unfortunately, there is no agreement about which variables should be included in a measure of stress. The authors survey a number of financial stress indexes, comparing the datasets from which they are ...
Working Paper
Credit ratings and bank monitoring ability
In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks? loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks? credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal that publicly available information from a credit bureau is not efficiently impounded in the bank ratings: The credit bureau ratings not only predict future movements in the bank ratings but also improve forecasts of bankruptcy and loan default. We investigate possible explanations for these findings. ...
Working Paper
Credit ratings and bank monitoring ability
In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is evidence that bank credit ratings, consistent with theory, contain valuable private information. However, the authors also find that public ratings have an ability to predict future bank ratings, implying that internal bank ratings do not fully or efficiently incorporate all publicly available information. ...
Journal Article
Recent Federal Reserve actions include expansion of loan program, release of banks' \"stress test\" results
The Fed recently broadened a program intended to stimulate bank lending and released the results of recent tests of the financial conditions of the 19 largest U.S. bank holding companies.
Conference Paper
Financial market risk premiums: time variation and macroeconomic links, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., July 21-22, 2005
Risk premiums are a critical component of asset pricing relationships, summarizing the interaction among investor preferences, expected asset payoffs, and fundamental uncertainty. The Federal Reserve Board, as both a producer and consumer of risk premium measures, is an ideal facilitator of a wide-ranging discussion of the latest advances in this area. The conference program selected this year focuses on the equity risk premium, consumption risk, and market volatility.
Working Paper
Risk aversion, risk premia, and the labor margin with generalized recursive preferences
A flexible labor margin allows households to absorb shocks to asset values with changes in hours worked as well as changes in consumption. This ability to absorb shocks along either or both margins greatly alters the household?s attitudes toward risk, as shown by Swanson (2012). The present paper extends that work to the case of generalized recursive preferences, as in Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1989), which are increasingly being used to bring macroeconomic models into closer agreement with basic asset pricing facts. Measures of risk aversion commonly used in the literature show no ...
Conference Paper
Long-run risks and equity Returns
Journal Article
When gauging bank capital adequacy, simplicity beats complexity
It is unclear whether ratio complexity enhances the ability to identify failure and is better than a simpler ratio. But a simpler ratio offers the benefits of greater transparency and accountability.