Bank participation in derivative markets has risen sharply in recent years. The total amount of interest rate, currency, commodity, and equity contracts at U.S. commercial and savings banks soared from $6.8 trillion in 1990 to $11.9 trillion in 1993, an increase of 75 percent. A major concern...

Managing risk has always been an integral part of banking. In the past two years an approach to risk management called "Value at Risk" has been accepted by both practitioners and regulators as the "right" way to measure risk, becoming a de facto industry standard. Yet, the danger is that...

Mutual funds are now the preferred way for individual investors and many institutions to participate in capital markets, and their popularity has increased demand for evaluations of fund performance. Many business publications now rank mutual funds according to their performance, and information...

Asset-backed securitization transforms assets into securities and in the process separates the credit risk of a pool of assets from the credit risk of the securitization's sponsor, which gives securitization several important advantages over issuing corporate debt. Recent research, however,...