In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the federal government has pursued significant regulatory reforms, including proposals to measure and monitor systemic risk. However, there is much debate about how this might be accomplished quantitatively and objectively—or whether this is...

As the nation ponders its response to the greatest financial crisis in generations, plans for regulatory reform are everywhere. Proposals to break up big financial companies, create a new agency for consumer protection, and lay out additional rules for derivatives, insurance companies, and hedge...

We document the impact of having a risk committee (RC) and a chief risk officer (CRO) on bank risk using the passage of the Dodd Frank Act as a natural experiment. The Act requires bank holding companies with over $10B of assets to have an RC to oversee risk management, while those with over...

The combination of rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities can create unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage, leading to a “ratchet” effect on leverage because homes are indivisible and owner-occupants cannot raise equity to...

We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over...

An important challenge worthy of NSF support is to quantify systemic financial risk. There are at least three major components to this challenge: modeling, measurement, and data accessibility. Progress on this challenge will require extending existing research in many directions and will require...