The 9/11 attacks in the United States, as well as other attacks in different parts of the world, raise important questions related to the economic impact of terrorism. What are the most effective ways for a country to recover from these economic losses? Who should pay for the costs of future...

The asset allocation of defined benefit pension plans is a setting where both risk shifting and risk management incentives are likely be present. Empirically, firms with poorly funded pension plans and weak credit ratings allocate a greater share of pension fund assets to safer securities such...

We present a model of optimal intervention in a flight to quality episode. The reason for intervention stems from a collective bias in agents' expectations. Agents in the model make risk management decisions with incomplete knowledge. They understand their own shocks, but are uncertain of how...

This paper provides a model of the interaction between risk-management practices and market liquidity. On one hand, tighter risk management reduces the maximum position an institution can take, thus the amount of liquidity it can offer to the market. On the other hand, risk managers can take...

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the...

Modern central bankers are the risk managers of the financial system. They take actions based not only on point forecasts for growth and inflation, but based on the entire distribution of possible macroeconomic outcomes. In numerous instances monetary policymakers have acted in ways designed to...

The average cash to assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms increases by 129% from 1980 to 2004. Because of this increase in the average cash ratio, American firms at the end of the sample period can pay back their debt obligations with their cash holdings, so that the average firm has no...

Based on this framework, we find that a Future Fund portfolio that included (amongst other potential investments) domestic nominal securities and equities of selected countries would reduce overall balance sheet risk