We assess the efficacy of systemic risk measures that rely on U.S. financial firms' stock return co-movements with market- or sector-wide returns under stress from 1927 to 2023. We ascertain stress episodes based on widening of corporate bond spreads and narrative dating. Systemic risk measures...

Economic theories posit that bank liability insurance is designed as serving the public interest by mitigating systemic risk in the banking system through liquidity risk reduction. Political theories see liability insurance as serving the private interests of banks, bank borrowers, and...

Over the last decade dealing in derivative financial instruments (basically forwards, futures, options and combinations of these), particularly in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market has become a central activity for major wholesale banks and financial institutions. Measured in terms...

We study time-consistent bank resolution mechanisms. When interventions are ex post efficient, a government cannot commit not to inject capital into the banking system. Contrary to common wisdom, we show that the government may still avoid moral hazard and implement the first best allocation by...

Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the costs of bank resolution when organizations fail, the effect of complexity on BHCs' broader...

This paper reviews the debt service ratio (DSR) as a theoretically well-grounded indicator of systemic risk. The DSR has the desirable feature that it fluctuates around a stable level which makes its early warning signals easy to understand and communicate. In contrast, current early warning...

Systemic risk is commonly used to describe the possibility of a series of correlated defaults among financial institutions---typically banks---that occur over a short period of time, often caused by a single major event. However, since the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, it has...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the risk of trading revenues of U.S. commercial banks. We collect quarterly data on trading revenues, broken down by business line, as well as the Value at Risk-based market risk charge. The overall picture from these preliminary results is that there...

We employ a unique hand-collected dataset and a novel methodology to examine systemic risk before and after the largest U.S. banking crisis of the 20th century. Our systemic risk measure captures both the credit risk of an individual bank as well as a bank's position in the network. We construct...