G01 - Financial CrisesReturn

As a regulatory answer to the crisis, financial instruments are increasingly forced to be cleared centrally even in the OTC markets; therefore, risk management of central clearinghouses has become a central issue. A key term of the regulation is a stress event; however, it is not specified in the legislation what should be meant under stress in the case of a clearinghouse. To find an objective stress indicator, we built up a micro-simulation model of a hypothetical clearinghouse operating on the US equity market between 2007 and 2015. Based on this, we developed a logit regression model to specify an appropriate stress indicator and we showed that our "tailor-made" stress index calibrated to the position of the clearinghouse performs significantly better than the usual market proxies for financial stress.

Income contingent schemes have been widely used in student lending in the last few decades. Recently, in the aftermath of the crisis of 2007-2008, several authors argued that income contingent loans have much better risk profiles than traditional fixed loans, and they proposed to extend their scope to other areas of retail lending, too. Hence, understanding this scheme can be relevant from the point of view of both human resource management and financial engineering. In this paper we analyzed the unusual characteristics of income contingent repayments, and derived closed formulas for stability, success and shape. We concluded that humped debt paths can be frightening; however, if the growth rate of the debt is lower than the growth rate of the income, then it is not a debt trap, but a natural consequence of this patient and flexible scheme, which requires new methods of communication, risk management, financing and administration.

This paper examines the roles played by market interdependence and contagion in the propagation of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. For this purpose, five aggregate indices were employed, representing all the major financial markets from each geographical region. The data series are daily and they cover the period between 2002 and 2014. The presence of contagion and market interdependence was assessed by means of the values and value changes of the correlation coefficients between the ante crisis (2002-2007), the crisis (2007-2009) and the post crisis (2009-2014) intervals, as well as with the aid of a spillover index. The results indicate a high degree of interdependence between the global financial markets even before the occurrence of the crisis. On the other hand, there is evidence that the crisis spread through contagion mainly from the developed financial markets of Europe and North America to the emerging centers in Africa and Latin America while the markets from the Asia/Pacific region displayed lower correlations which may have given opportunities for the mitigation of losses. Moreover, since the majority of the correlation coefficients have not decreased significantly after the 2007-2009 period, it seems that the crisis intensified the degree of global financial integration.