The Basel 2 Accord requires regulatory capital to cover stress tests, yet no coherent and objective framework for stress testing portfolios exists. We propose a new methodology for stress testing in the context of market risk models that can incorporate both volatility clustering and heavy tails. Empirical results compare the performance of eight risk models with four possible conditional and unconditional return distributions over different rolling estimation periods. When applied to major currency pairs using daily data spanning more than 20 years we find that stress test results should have little impact on current levels of foreign exchange regulatory capital.

In the finance industry, risk compliance has become an important issue after numerous policy violations resulting in significant costs for financial institutions and society as a whole. We run a lab-in-the-field experiment with 269 finance professionals, to investigate the effects of financial incentives and workplace culture on risk compliance. Relative to variable remuneration (linked to expected profits), fixed remuneration increases the proportion of people complying by as much as 25.1 percentage points. This is achieved with no diminution in productivity. Relative to a profit-focused workplace culture, a risk-focused workplace culture increases the proportion of people complying by 16.3 percentage points.

Financial services misconduct is a concern for many stakeholders and deferred variable remuneration has been proposed as an antidote. The implications for attracting/retaining productive individuals are unknown. This study investigates deferred payment mechanisms through experiments in student and professional samples, taking account of self-selection effects. We confirm that the introduction of deferrals would reduce misconduct through better monitoring. While some individuals eschew deferred payment, even in the presence of a deferral premium, productive individuals are under-represented in this group. Productive individuals are more likely to select deferred variable remuneration, so productivity outcomes are equal to or superior to alternative treatments.