After the Lehman default, but also during the euro area sovereign debt crisis, central banks have tended to extend the ability of banks to take recourse to central bank credit operations through changes of the collateral framework (e.g. CGFS, 2008 - in consistence with previous narratives, such...

Repo auctions are used to inject central bank funds against collateral into the banking sector. The ECB uses standard discriminatory auctions and hundreds of banks participate. The amount auctioned over the monthly reserve maintenance period is in principle exactly what banks collectively need...

We study bidder behavior and performance in 53 main refinancing operations (quot;repo auctionsquot;) of the European Central Bank (ECB). The data set starts with the first auction after the ECB changed from fixed rate tenders to variable rate tenders. We find that private information and the...

This report summarises the findings of the task force. It is organised as follows. Section 2 starts with a discussion of the relevance of credit risk for central banks. It is followed by a short introduction to credit risk models, parameters and systems in Section 3, focusing on models used by...

This paper reviews the role and effects of the collateral framework which central banks, and in particular the Eurosystem, use in conducting temporary monetary policy operations. First, the paper explains the design of such a framework from the perspective of risk mitigation, which is the...

We suggest that the term structure of VIX futures shows a clear pattern of dependence on the current level of VIX index. At the low levels of VIX (below 20), the term structure is highly upward sloping, while at the high VIX levels (over 30) it is strongly downward sloping. We use these features...

We suggest that the term structure of volatility futures (e.g. VIX futures) shows a clear pattern of dependence on the current level of VIX index. At the low level of VIX (below 20) the term structure is highly upward sloping; at the high VIX level (over 30) it is strongly downward sloping. We...

The article presents a simple parameterization of the volatility surface for options on the S&P 500 volatility index, VIX. Specifically, we document the following features of VIX implied volatility: (i) VIX at-the-money (ATM) implied volatility correlates strongly with the volatility skew in S&P...

This paper investigates the changes in the investment portfolio performance after including VIX. We apply different models for optimal portfolio selection (Markowitz and Black-Litterman) assuming both the possibility of short sale and the lack of it. We also use various assets, data frequencies,...

Central bank lending to commercial banks is typically collateralized which reduces central bank’s credit risk exposure to “double default events” when the counterparty and the issuer of the underlying collateral asset both default in a short period of time. This paper presents a simple...