The quot;Big Bangquot; deregulation of Japanese financial markets focuses on financial modernization. I argue that financial modernization is of secondary importance for improving the performance of the Japanese economy. A key long-term issue facing Japan is to maintain its high level of per...

Event risk is the risk that a portfolio's value can be affected by large jumps in market prices. Event risk is synonymous with quot;fat tailsquot; or quot;jump riskquot;. Event risk is one component of quot;specific riskquot;, defined by bank supervisors as the component of market risk not...

I test whether corporate governance is ineffective in emerging markets by estimating the link between CEO turnover and firm performance for over 1,200 firms in eight emerging markets. While previous papers on corporate governance in emerging markets have studied corporate governance mechanisms,...

Jamshidian and Zhu (1997) propose a discrete grid method for simplifying the computation of Value at Risk (VaR) for fixed-income portfolios. Their method relies on two simplifications. First, the value of fixed income instruments is modeled as depending on a small number of risk factors chosen...

Financial dealer firms have invested heavily in recent years to develop information systems for risk measurement. I take it as given that technological progress is likely to continue at a rapid pace, making it less expensive for financial firms to assemble risk information. I look beyond...

Firms active in OTC derivative markets increasingly use margin agreements to reduce counterparty credit risk. Making several simplifying assumptions, I use both a quasi-analytic approach and a simulation approach to quantify how margining reduces counterparty credit exposure. Margining reduces...

The striking growth of credit derivatives suggests that market participants find them to be useful tools for risk management. I illustrate the value of credit derivatives with three examples. A commercial bank can use credit derivatives to manage the risk of its loan portfolio. An investment...

Synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or synthetic CDOs, are popular vehicles for trading the credit risk of a portfolio of assets. Following a brief summary of the development of the synthetic CDO market, I draw on recent innovations in modeling to present a pricing model for CDO tranches...

Correlations are crucial for pricing and hedging derivatives whose payoff depends on more than one asset. Typically, correlations computed separately for ordinary and stressful market conditions differ considerably, a pattern widely termed quot;correlation breakdown.quot; As a result, risk...

A forecast of the correlation between two asset prices is required to price or hedge an option whose payoff depends on both asset prices or to measure the risk of a portfolio whose return depends on both asset prices. However, a number of factors make it difficult to evaluate forecasts of...