UBS recently announced it would pay part of the bonuses of 6,500 highly compensated employees with bonds that would be forfeited if the bank does not meet its capital requirements. This memo underscores the benefits of contingent deferred compensation and makes recommendations for how such...

To address the moral hazard problem that can motivate bank executives to take excessive risks and to fail to raise capital when needed, a group of 13 distinguished financial economists recommends that systemically important financial institutions be required to issue contingent convertible debt...

We propose several econometric measures of systemic risk to capture the interconnectedness among the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, brokers, and insurance companies based on principal components analysis and Granger-causality tests. We find that all four sectors have become highly...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

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...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...