Over the past decade, commercial banks have devoted many resources to developing internal models to better quantify their financial risks and assign economic capital. These efforts have been recognized and encouraged by bank regulators; for example, the 1997 Market Risk Amendment (MRA) formally...

The moral hazard problem associated with deposit insurance generates the potential for excessive risk taking on the part of bank owners. The banking literature identifies franchise value -- a firm’s profit-generating potential -- as one force mitigating that risk taking. We argue that in the...

The moral hazard problem associated with deposit insurance generates the potential for excessive risk taking on the part of bank owners. The banking literature identifies franchise value--a firm's profit-generating potential--as one force mitigating that risk taking. We argue that in the...

Covariance matrix forecasts of financial asset returns are an important component of current practice in financial risk management. A wide variety of models, ranging from matrices of simple summary measures to covariance matrices implied from option prices, are available for generating such...

Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for financial market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models i.e., models of the time-varying distributions of portfolio returns. Currently, regulators have available three hypothesis-testing...

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 3, "Issues in value-at-risk modeling and evaluation." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was...