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Free Riding in Finance: A Primer

Many features of our financial system—institutions like banks and insurance companies, as well as the configuration of securities markets—are a consequence of legal conventions (the rules about property rights and taxes) and the costs associated with obtaining and verifying information. When we teach money and banking, three concepts are key to understanding the structure of finance: adverse selection, moral hazard, and free riding. The first two arise from asymmetric information, either before (adverse selection) or after (moral hazard) making a financial arrangement (see our earlier primers here and here).

This primer is about the third concept: free riding. Free riding is tied to the concept of a public good, so we start there. Then, we offer three examples where free riding plays a key role in the organization of finance: credit ratings; schemes like the Madoff scandal; and efforts to secure financial stability more broadly....

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Operational Risk and Financial Stability

Recent disasters—both natural and man-made—prompt us to reflect on the relationship between operational risk and financial stability. Severe weather in sensitive locations, such as Hurricane Irma in Florida, raises questions about the resilience of the financial infrastructure. The extraordinary breach at Equifax highlights the public goods aspect of data protection, with potential implications for the availability of household credit.

At this stage, it’s important to pose the right questions about these operational shocks and, over time, to draw the right lessons. We expect that systemic financial intermediaries’ risk managers, members of their boards, their regulators, and their ultimate legislative overseers are currently in the midst of an intensive review of exposures (and that of the financial system as a whole) to these risks.

So, what is operational risk (OR)? The Basel Committee for Banking Supervision (BCBS) defines OR as “the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events”....

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