Contingent Capital: An In-Depth Discussion
Stan Maes
European Commission - DG Internal market and financial services; European Commission - DG Competition; KU Leuven - Department of Economics
Wim Schoutens
KU Leuven - Department of Mathematics
August 2, 2010
Abstract:
Regulators have embraced the idea of pre-arranging bank recapitalizations through (funded or unfunded) contingent capital issuance. Contingent capital is intended to be triggered when a bank is headed toward failure in order to provide an automatic equity injection that keeps the bank out of distress. This note discusses counterparty risk, effectiveness, moral hazard, contagion and systemic risk, as well as death-spiral issues arising from the hedging strategies of the investors. We pay attention to important design issues with respect to the trigger and conversion ratio and comment on their pricing from an equity and credit derivative perspective.
Keywords: Contingent Capital, Moral Hazard, Financial Regulation
JEL Classification: G12, G13, G21, G28, G32
working papers series
Suggested Citation
Maes, Stan and Schoutens, Wim, Contingent Capital: An In-Depth Discussion (August 2, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1653877 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1653877
