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Review of Financial Studies Vol. 33 No. 6 2020

Risk Management Failures

Matthieu Bouvard1; Samuel Lee2

1 McGill University · 2 Santa Clara University, ECGI, and Swedish House of Finance

Abstract

We model risk management as information acquisition that delays trading decisions. In markets with preemptive competition, this can lead to a race to the bottom, where prioritizing trade execution over risk management is optimal for each firm, but collectively inefficient. As time competition intensifies, mean trading profit supplants risk concerns as the main driver of risk management quality, causing risk misallocation to rise with trading speed and volume. This pathology of risk management failure—the trio of time-consuming risk assessment, preemptive competition, and boom markets—has distinctive regulatory implications.

DOI
10.1093/rfs/hhz115
Volume
33
Issue
6
Pages
2468-2505
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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