The effect of the new risk-based capital requirements on the market for swaps

The new risk-based capital requirements for banks cover swap agreements as well as the normal on-balancesheet items. The capital calculation is based on a fixed small percentage plus the current market value of the swap, if it is positive. Using option valuation methodology, anticipated capital requirements over the life of a swap are calculated. These requirements are compared to cushions that banks might want to hold against the risks of above average loss rates. For interest rate swaps, the cost of the capital requirements is small, amounting to about 1 bp/year on a swap; in a matched pair, this would amount to 2 bp in the bid-offer spread. On currency swaps, the cost of the capital requirements appears to be much more substantial, closer to 4 bp per year on a swap. In a matched pair, the excess of the capital requirements over desired cushion could amount to 7 bp in the bid offer spread.     

Private equity and regulatory capital

Regulatory capital requirements for European banks have been put forward in the Basel II Capital Framework and subsequently in the capital requirements directive (CRD) of the EU. We provide a detailed discussion of the capital requirements for private equity investments under different approaches. For the internal model approach we present a structural model that we calibrate to a proprietary dataset. We modify the standard Merton structural model to make it applicable in practice and to capture stylized facts of private equity investments. We also implement the early default feature with a fast simulation algorithm. Our results support capital requirements lower than in Basel II, but not as low as in CRD, thereby giving adverse incentives to banks for using advanced risk models. A sensitivity analysis shows that this finding is robust to parameter uncertainty and stress scenarios.     

Economic and regulatory capital allocation for revolving retail exposures

We present two internal capital allocation models and compare the capital ratios they generate with those prescribed by the latest revision of Basel’s New Capital Accord proposal for advanced retail portfolios, which allows for explicit future margin income recognition. Given a test portfolio of credit card exposures that we assemble, we find that Basel’s ratios are closer to those generated by our models for low credit risk segments. We attribute the discrepancies to the different ways Basel and our models account for future margin income, to Basel’s assumptions about asset correlations and to one model taking macroeconomic conditions into account.     

Backtesting Stochastic Mortality Models

Abstract

This study sets out a backtesting framework applicable to the multiperiod-ahead forecasts from stochastic mortality models and uses it to evaluate the forecasting performance of six different stochastic mortality models applied to English & Welsh male mortality data. The models considered are the following: Lee-Carter’s 1992 one-factor model; a version of Renshaw-Haberman’s 2006 extension of the Lee-Carter model to allow for a cohort effect; the age-period-cohort model, which is a simplified version of Renshaw-Haberman; Cairns, Blake, and Dowd’s 2006 two-factor model; and two generalized versions of the last named with an added cohort effect. For the data set used herein, the results from applying this methodology suggest that the models perform adequately by most backtests and that prediction intervals that incorporate parameter uncertainty are wider than those that do not. We also find little difference between the performances of five of the models, but the remaining model shows considerable forecast instability.     

Cross-country effects of regulatory capital arbitrage

One reason for the recent asset price bubbles in many developed countries could be regulatory capital arbitrage. Regulatory and legal changes can help traditional banks to move their assets off their balance sheets into the lightly regulated shadows and thus enable regulatory arbitrage through the securitized sector. This paper adopts a global vector autoregression (GVAR) methodology to assess the effects of regulatory capital arbitrage on equity prices, house prices and economic activity across 11 OECD countries/regions. A counterfactual experiment disentangles the effects of regulatory arbitrage following a change in the net capital rule for investment banks in April 2004 and the adoption of the Basel II Accord in June 2004. The results provide evidence for the existence of an international finance multiplier, with about half of the countries overshooting U.S. impulse responses. The counterfactual shows that regulatory arbitrage via the U.S. securitized sector may enhance the cross-country reallocation of capital from housing markets towards equity markets.     

Organizational structure,risk-based capital requirements,and the sales of downgraded bonds

Using bond downgrades as external shocks to life insurers’ asset risk, we document several findings of the impact of organizational structure and risk factors on investment risk taking. First, we find that mutual insurers and widely-held stock insurers are more likely to sell downgraded bonds than are closely-held stock insurers. Second, we find evidence that insurers are less likely to sell downgraded bonds that remain in the same rating class than bonds downgraded to a lower rating class. The result implies that insurers sell downgraded bonds mainly because of additional capital charge is imposed, not because of downgrade itself. In other words, risk factors in risk-based capital regulation do matter on life insurers’ investment risk taking. Finally, we find that life insurers might be reluctant to sell downgraded bonds at fire-sale prices during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.     

采用信用风险模型计提监管资本:问题和对策

实施基于商业银行内部信用风险模型的资本监管制度对监管当局和商业银行都提出了严峻的挑战。信用风险计量模型不仅在理论上应经得起推敲,其计量结果在实证上需经得起检验,并且在不同银行间应具有可比性。本文为美联储的五位高级监管人员(Beverly J.Hirtle,Mark Levonian,Marc Saidenberg,Stefan Walter,David Wright)发表在《纽约联储经济政策评论》2001年3月号上的研究报告。该报告对采用风险计量模型计提信用风险资本所涉及的许多重大问题进行了深入讨论,揭示了内部评级法的技术原理,业界关于内部评级法的许多争论很大程度上都围绕这些问题展开,部分问题在新资本协议最终稿以及巴塞尔委员会发表的监管文件中可以找到答案,如时间跨度、使用测试、贷款损失准备处理、报告频率等;但有些问题仍未解决,讨论还在继续,如计量模型的具体形式、模型验证技术。本报告对于读者深入理解内部评级技术和监管要求具有很强指导作用。     

Bank earnings and regulatory capital management using available for sale securities

Based on a large sample of publicly listed and non-listed US commercial banks from 1996 to 2011, we find robust evidence consistent with banks using realized available for sale (AFS) securities gains and losses to smooth earnings and increase low regulatory capital. We also find that (i) banks with positive earnings smooth earnings, and banks with negative earnings generally take big baths; (ii) regulatory capital constrains big baths; (iii) banks with more negative earnings and more unrealized beginning-of-quarter losses (gains) take big baths (smooth earnings); and (iv) banks with low regulatory capital and more unrealized gains realize more gains. Also, banks with negative earnings take big baths (avoid or reduce the earnings loss) if their unrealized gains are insufficient (sufficient) to offset the negative earnings. Our inferences apply to listed and non-listed banks, which indicates that the earnings management incentives do not derive solely from public capital markets. Our findings reveal that the accounting for AFS securities gains and losses enables banks to manage regulatory capital and earnings in a variety of ways.     

Recent changes to the regulatory framework for the private capital market

The study reviews key regulatory events in the private offerings market during the period 2005–2020. One goal of this review is to help researchers identify and better understand these regulatory changes, and how they affect capital raising and investing in this market. Hopefully, some of them also could be used as exogenous shocks in future research. Another goal is to encourage researchers to study more closely some of the recent regulatory changes and nudge them to explore interesting issues in the private offerings area. Recent studies that have studied some of these regulatory events are reviewed as well.     

Backtesting value-at-risk based on tail losses

Extreme losses caused by leverage and financial derivatives highlight the need to backtest Value-at-Risk (VaR) based on the sizes of tail losses, because the risk measure currently used disregards losses beyond the VaR boundary. While Basel II backtests VaR by counting the number of exceptions, this paper proposes to use the saddlepoint technique by summing the sizes of tail losses. Monte Carlo simulations show that the technique is extremely accurate and powerful, even for small samples. Empirical applications for the proposed backtest find substantial downside tail risks in S&P 500, and demonstrate that risk models which account for jumps, skewed and fat-tailed distributions failed to capture the tail risk during the 1987 stock market crash. Finally, the saddlepoint technique is used to derive a multiplication factor for any risk capital requirement that is responsive to the sizes of tail losses.     

中国金属期货市场的风险度量及其Backtesting分析

以上海期货交易所的3种代表性金属期货价格指数为例,首先对其价格变化的动力学特征及波动模式进行了全面深入的考察,然后运用严谨系统的后验分析(Backtesting analysis)方法,分别在多头和空头两种头寸状况以及5种不同分位数水平下,实证对比了8种风险测度模型对VaR(Value at Risk)和ES(Excepted shortfall)两种不同风险指标估计的精度差异。研究结果表明:在综合考虑了模型对金属期货价格变化动力学的刻画效果以及对不同风险指标的测度精度等因素后,基于有偏学生t分布的APGARCH模型是一个相对合理的风险测度模型选择。     

Impact of regulatory interactions on bank capital structure

This article examines a bank's optimal capital structure and risk-taking decisions in a regulated environment. We focus on the interactive nature of the Fed's collateralized discount window lending and the FDIC's deposit insurance. Such regulatory interactions are shown to have nonlinear and nonuniform impacts on the bank's leverage and risk-taking decisions. Thus, bank moral hazard problems may persist, even when banks are charged risk-adjusted deposit insurance premia and are also subject to market discipline through subordinate debt. Our analysis yields several new policy implications about the design and pricing of bank regulations.     

Backtesting Value-at-Risk: A Duration-Based Approach

Financial risk model evaluation or backtesting is a key partof the internal model's approach to market risk management aslaid out by the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision. However,existing backtesting methods have relatively low power in realisticsmall sample settings. Our contribution is the exploration ofnew tools for backtesting based on the duration of days betweenthe violations of the Value-at-Risk. Our Monte Carlo resultsshow that in realistic situations, the new duration-based testshave considerably better power properties than the previouslysuggested tests.     

Risk quantification for commodity ETFs: Backtesting value-at-risk and expected shortfall

This paper calibrates risk assessment of alternative methods for modeling commodity ETFs. We implement recently proposed backtesting techniques for both value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) under parametric and semi-nonparametric techniques. Our results indicate that skewed-t and Gram-Charlier distributional assumptions present the best relative performance for individual Commodity ETFs for those confidence levels recommended by Basel Accords. In view of these results, we recommend the application of leptokurtic distributions and semi-nonparametric techniques to mitigate regulation concerns about global financial stability of commodity business.     

Liquidity creation,regulatory capital,and bank profitability

We examine the interrelationships among liquidity creation, regulatory capital, and bank profitability of US banks. We find that regulatory capital and liquidity creation affect each other positively after controlling for bank profitability. However, this relationship is largely driven by small banks and primarily during non-crisis periods. It is also sensitive to the level of banks' regulatory capital and how it is measured. Furthermore, we find that banks which create more liquidity and exhibit higher illiquidity risk have lower profitability. Finally, the relationship between regulatory capital and bank performance is not linear and depends on the level of capitalization. Regulatory capital is negatively related to bank profitability for higher capitalized banks but positively related to profitability for lower capitalized banks. Therefore, a change in regulatory capital has differential impacts on bank performance. Our findings have various implications for policymakers and bank regulators.     

Bank liquidity creation following regulatory interventions and capital support

We study the effects of regulatory interventions and capital support (bailouts) on banks’ liquidity creation. We rely on instrumental variables to deal with possible endogeneity concerns. Our key findings, which are based on a unique supervisory German dataset, are that regulatory interventions robustly trigger decreases in liquidity creation, while capital support does not affect liquidity creation. Additional results include the effects of these actions on different components of liquidity creation, lending, and risk taking. Our findings provide new and important insights into the debates about the design of regulatory interventions and bailouts.     

Measures of the riskiness of banking organizations: Subordinated debt yields,risk-based capital,and examination ratings

Recently there have been a number of recommendations to increase the role of subordinated debt (SND) in satisfying bank capital requirements as a preferred means to discipline the risk-taking behavior of systemically important banks. One such proposal recommended using SND yield spreads as the triggers for mandatory supervisory action under prompt corrective action guidelines introduced in US banking legislation in the early 1990s. Currently such action is prompted by bank capital ratios. Evidence from previous research suggests that yield information may be a better predictor of bank problems. This paper empirically analyzes potential costs and benefits of using SND signals to trigger prompt corrective action.     

Fair insurance guaranty premia in the presence of risk-based capital regulations,stochastic interest rate and catastrophe risk

A multiperiod model is developed to measure the costs posed to the guaranty fund in a setting that incorporates risk-based capital regulations, interest rate risk and the possibility of catastrophic losses. The guaranty contract is modeled as a put option on the asset of the insurance company with a stochastic strike price and an uncertain maturity. The impacts of the key factors of this model are examined numerically and shown to make material differences in the costs to the guaranty fund.