A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it weakens its incentive to invest, decreasing growth. Instead, the sovereign may choose to fund the bailout by diluting existing government bondholders, resulting in a deterioration of the sovereign's creditworthiness. This deterioration feeds back to the financial sector, reducing the value of its guarantees and existing bond holdings as well as increasing its sensitivity to future sovereign shocks. We provide empirical evidence for this two-way feedback between financial and sovereign credit risk using data on the credit default swaps (CDS) of the Eurozone countries and their banks for 2007-11. We show that the announcement of financial sector bailouts was associated with an immediate, unprecedented widening of sovereign CDS spreads and narrowing of bank CDS spreads; however, post-bailouts there emerged a significant co-movement between bank CDS and sovereign CDS, even after controlling for banks' equity performance, the latter being consistent with an effect of the quality of sovereign guarantees on bank credit risk.

Our approach is a formal model that provides an intellectual combination of the two by looking at how shocks propagate through a network of interconnected banks. Transmission in our model is not based on default. Instead, we provide a simple microfoundation of banks’ profitability based on classic competition incentives. As competitors lending quantities change, both for closely connected ones and the whole market, banks adjust their own lending decisions as a result, generating a ‘transmission’ of shocks through the system. We provide a unique equilibrium characterization of a static model, and embed this model into a full dynamic model of network formation with n agents. Because we have an explicit characterization of equilibrium behavior, we have a tractable way to bring the model to the data. Indeed, our measures of systemic risk capture the propagation of shocks in a wide variety of contexts; that is, it can explain the pattern of behavior both in good times as well as in crisis.

Risk management is enabled through a coordination of operating flexibility, liquidity management, and derivatives hedging policies. We analyze the value created by such integrated risk management strategies, and disintegrate this value in several ways to separate out the marginal impacts of specifc frictions and of different risk management solutions. We highlight the importance of distress costs as well as a convexity due to personal taxes on equity income. We show that liquidity serves a critical role in risk management, providing a rationalization for seemingly high levels of cash reserves. The value attributable to derivatives usage does not appear to be signifcant in the presence of other risk management mechanisms, though we identify circumstances where this value is larger, thus helping to resolve conflicting empirical evidence on this issue. We examine why a signifcant portion of the value loss due to frictions in the presence of uncertainty still remains even under the integrated risk management strategy we employ. Finally, we evaluate the net impact of risk management policies in the presence of fnancial agency problems that distort these policies.

The goal of the workshop was to initiate a research discussion about the knowledge representation challenges for effective financial information management. Over fifty invited academic researchers, financial regulators and industry practitioners participated in the event. The participants brought diverse perspectives and expertise in economics, computer science, finance, and information science, resulting in an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. The specific topics covered a broad range, including financial risk management, ontologies for knowledge representation, formal logics, schema mapping, systemic risk, constraint languages, networks, simulation techniques, data integrity, operational risk and data security, to name a few. This report describes the discussions flowing from the workshop and its immediate aftermath in greater detail. We hope, however, that this is only the beginning of a much longer conversation.