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Working Paper
Benchmarking Operational Risk Models
The 2004 Basel II accord requires internationally active banks to hold regulatory capital for operational risk, and the Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) requires banks to project operational risk losses under stressed scenarios. As a result, banks subject to these rules have measured and managed operational risk more rigorously. But some types of operational risk - particularly legal risk - are challenging to model because such exposures tend to be fat-tailed. Tail operational risk losses have significantly impacted banks' balance sheets and income ...
Working Paper
The Information Value of Past Losses in Operational Risk
Operational risk is a substantial source of risk for US banks. Improving the performance of operational risk models allows banks’ management to make more informed risk decisions by better matching economic capital and risk appetite, and allows regulators to enhance their understanding of banks’ operational risk. We show that past operational losses are informative of future losses, even after controlling for a wide range of financial characteristics. We propose that the information provided by past losses results from them capturing hard to quantify factors such as the quality of ...
Working Paper
Business complexity and risk management: evidence from operational risk events in U. S. bank holding companies
How does business complexity affect risk management in financial institutions? The commonly used risk measures rely on either balance-sheet or market-based information, both of which may suffer from identification problems when it comes to answering this question. Balance-sheet measures, such as return on assets, capture the risk when it is realized, while empirical identification requires knowledge of the risk when it is actually taken. Market-based measures, such as bond yields, not only ignore the problem that investors are not fully aware of all the risks taken by management due to ...
Working Paper
Predicting Operational Loss Exposure Using Past Losses
Operational risk models, such as the loss distribution approach, frequently use past internal losses to forecast operational loss exposure. However, the ability of past losses to predict exposure, particularly tail exposure, has not been thoroughly examined in the literature. In this paper, we test whether simple metrics derived from past loss experience are predictive of future tail operational loss exposure using quantile regression. We find evidence that past losses are predictive of future exposure, particularly metrics related to loss frequency.
Working Paper
Operational Loss Recoveries and the Macroeconomic Environment: Evidence from the U.S. Banking Sector
Using supervisory data from large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), we document that operational loss recovery rates decrease in macroeconomic downturns. This procyclical relationship varies by business lines and loss event types and is robust to alternative data aggregations, macroeconomic measurement horizons and estimation methodologies. Further analysis shows that resource constraints faced by BHC risk management functions are a plausible explanation for these patterns. Our findings offer new evidence on how economic shocks transmit to banking industry losses with implications for risk ...
Discussion Paper
Coming to Terms with Operational Risk
The term ?operational risk? often evokes images of catastrophic events like hurricanes and earthquakes. For financial institutions, however, operational risk has a broader scope, encompassing losses related to fraud, rogue trading, product misrepresentation, computer and system failures, and cyberattacks, among other things. In this blog post, we discuss how operational risk has come into greater focus over the past two decades?to the point that it now accounts for more than a quarter of financial institutions? regulatory capital.
Working Paper
Haste Makes Waste: Banking Organization Growth and Operational Risk
This study shows that banking organization growth is associated with higher operational losses per dollar of total assets and incidence of tail risks. Event studies using M&A activity and instrumental variable regressions provide consistent evidence. The relationship between banking organization growth and operational risk varies by loss event types and balance sheet categories. We demonstrate that higher growth predicts worse operational risk realizations during the global financial crisis. These findings have implications for bank performance, risk management and supervision in a ...
Speech
Welcome remarks at First New York Fed Fintech Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City
Remarks at the First New York Fed Fintech Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Report
A general approach to integrated risk management with skewed, fat-tailed risks
The goal of integrated risk management in a financial institution is to measure and manage risk and capital across a range of diverse business activities. This requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. In this paper, we use the method of copulas to construct the joint risk distribution for a typical large, internationally active bank. This technique allows us to incorporate realistic marginal distributions that capture some of the essential empirical features of these risks-such as skewness and fat ...
Working Paper
Are the Largest Banking Organizations Operationally More Risky?
This study demonstrates that, among large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), the largest ones are exposed to more operational risk. Specifically, they have higher operational losses per dollar of total assets, a result largely driven by the BHCs' failure to meet professional obligations to clients and/or faulty product design. Operational risk at the largest U.S. institutions is also found to: (i) be particularly persistent, (ii) have a counter-cyclical component (higher losses occur during economic downturns) and (iii) materialize through more frequent tail-risk events. We illustrate two ...