The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context where banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. Moreover, higher capital may have an...

The objective of future Basel III regulations is to improve the capacity of the banking sector to absorb economic and financial shocks, from whatever source, while reducing the risk of contagion in the financial sector to the real economy. One of the main reasons that the economic and financial...

There is increasing recognition that prior to the global financial crisis financial regulation had lacked a macroprudential perspective. There has since been a strong effort to make a new macroprudential orientation operational, including through the establishment of new macroprudential...

We propose several connectedness measures built from pieces of variance decompositions, and we argue that they provide natural and insightful measures of connectedness among financial asset returns and volatilities. We also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so...

I elaborate on the structural causes of the global systemic crisis of 2007-9 to show that its ultimate origins lie in the still defective bookkeeping structure of national and international payment systems. As monetary circuit theory shows, banks are special, insofar as they can grant loans...