Derivatives exchanges often determine collateral requirements, which are fundamental to market safety, with dated risk models assuming normal returns. However, derivatives returns are heavy-tailed, which leads to the systematic under-collection of collateral (margin). This paper uses extreme...

Bank regulation is based on the premise that risks spill over more easily from large banks to the banking system than vice versa. On the contrary, we document that risk transmission is stronger in the system-to-bank direction. We term this asymmetric systemic risk, measure it with net exposure...

Do banks realize simultaneous trading losses because they invest in the same assets, or because different assets are subject to the same macro shocks? This paper decomposes the comovements of bank trading losses into two orthogonal channels: portfolio overlap and common shocks. While portfolio...

This paper studies the relationship between bank holding company affiliation and the individual and systemic risk of banks. Using the 2005 hurricane season in the US as an exogenous shock to bank balance sheets, we show that banks that are part of a holding parent company are more resilient than...

Conventional collateral requirements are highly conservative but are not explicitly designed to deal with systemic risk. This paper explores the adequacy of conventional collateral levels against systemic risk in the Canadian futures market during the 2008 crisis. Our results show that...

Catastrophe insurance differs from regular insurance in that individual claims are correlated and insurers have to pay more clients at once, which creates a liquidity strain. In this paper, I show two related findings: first, that when customers know their claims are correlated, this correlation...

A major policy challenge posed by derivatives clearinghouses is that their collateral requirements can rise sharply in times of stress, reducing market liquidity and further exacerbating downturns. Smoothing sharp changes in collateral requirements - an approach known as through-the-cycle...

This paper explores the extent to which correlated investments in the futures market concentrated systemic risk on large Canadian banks around the 2008 crisis. We find that core banks took positions against the periphery, increasing their systemic risk as a group. On the portfolio level,...