Natural Hazard Overview: Flooding

The National Centre for Resilience supported the Met Office and their partner organisations in the production of a set of Natural Hazard Overviews. This factsheet is one of the set commissioned to meet a requirement for Scotland-specific information on the types, scale, duration and impact of a range of natural hazards. It contains basic guidance on actions that can be taken to mitigate the impact of flooding. They include information previously produced by the Natural Hazards Partnership, adapted to a Scottish context and with the addition of case studies

Natural Hazard Overview: Landslides

The National Centre for Resilience supported the Met Office and their partner organisations in the production of a set of Natural Hazard Overviews. This factsheet is one of the set commissioned to meet a requirement for Scotland-specific information on the types, scale, duration and impact of a range of natural hazards. It contains basic guidance on actions that can be taken to mitigate the impact of landslides. The set of factsheets include information previously produced by the Natural Hazards Partnership, adapted to a Scottish context and with the addition of case studies

Natural Hazard Overview: Wind

The National Centre for Resilience supported the Met Office and their partner organisations in the production of a set of Natural Hazard Overviews. This factsheet is one of the set commissioned to meet a requirement for Scotland-specific information on the types, scale, duration and impact of a range of natural hazards. It contains basic guidance on actions that can be taken to mitigate the impact of strong winds. The set of factsheets include information previously produced by the Natural Hazards Partnership, adapted to a Scottish context and with the addition of case studies

Interoperability between central counterparties

In reaction to recent requests for interoperability between central counterparties of European stock markets, regulators have issued new guidelines to contain systemic risk. Our analysis confirms that the currently applied cross-CCP risk management model can be a source of contagion, particularly if applied in multilateral frameworks. While regulators' new guidelines eliminate systemic risk, this comes at the cost of an inefficiently overcollateralised clearing system. We discuss further approaches that contain systemic risk while reducing or eliminating overcollateralisation. Interoperability is of economic importance as it may contribute to the efficiency and safety of a worldwide fragmented clearing infrastructure.interoperability between central counterparties, financial network, systemic risk, netting efficiency

The Exposure of Swiss Banks to Macroeconomic Shocks - an Empirical Investigation

Assessing financial stability is an issue of rapidly growing importance to central banks and banking authorities. This paper explores an extensive panel data set of Swiss banks to identify macroeconomic influencing factors on bank profitability and to quantify their impact on bank capitalization. We find evidence of a significant effect of various macroeconomic variables as e.g. real growth or interest rate shocks on bank earnings. However, our results suggest that the Swiss banking system is quite robust against macroeconomic shocks. Only a joint occurrence of a recession, rising interest rates and falling stock prices would lead to substantial losses in the Swiss banking industry.banking, macroeconomic shocks, stress tests, credit risk, interestrate risk, Switzerland

An Orthogonal Polynomial Approach to Estimate the Term Structure of Interest Rates

In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm to estimate the term structure of interest rates. It is obtained from a constrained optimization, where the objective is to minimize the integral of squared first derivatives of the instantaneous forward interest rate subject to the condition that the estimated bond prices lie within the range of observed bid and ask prices. We use a finite series of ordinary Laguerre polynomials to approximate the unknown function of the instantaneous forward interest rate. The objective function can be written explicitly as a quadratic form of the Laguerre constants and the nonlinear constraints can be obtained from a recurrence relationship. The estimation error is less than one basis point, given a sufficient number of bonds.Term structure of interest rates, orthogonal polynomial