A central counterparty (CCP) is a financial market utility that lowers counterparty default risk on specified financial contracts by acting as a buyer to every seller, and as a seller to every buyer. When at risk of failure, a CCP could be forced into a normal insolvency process such as...

For nearly two years, the two of us have had a running discussion of the costs and benefits of automatic stays in bankruptcy for qualified financial contracts (QFCs) such as derivatives and repurchase agreements, particularly those held by systemically important major dealer banks. Under current...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of bankruptcy over relatively long time horizons, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. We find evidence in the U.S. industrial machinery and instruments sector, based on...