In doing my weekly SSRN search, I was absolutely delighted to see Professor Ron Berndsen’s Five Fundamental Questions on Central Counterparties (here) (note: these institutions are sometimes also referred to as CCPs or clearinghouses).  Berndsen has produced an extensive and invaluable review of the “booming literature on CCPs, of which about 60% is published in the last five years.”  As he notes, this area “can be considered as the most important niche of financial economics.” 

Berndsen organizes the review through “asking five fundamental questions about CCPs.”  Table 6 on p.30 (copied below) provides these questions and shortened answers.

 

Berndsen_Table6


I am grateful to Berndsen for writing this article, proposing future research topics based on his extensive review of the literature, and providing a comprehensive bibliography (even if it has increased my "to read" list!).  An abstract of the article is below:           

Central counterparties (CCPs) are designed to reduce aggregate counterparty credit risk and function as market infrastructures for capital markets in securities and derivatives. Although CCPs, also known as clearing houses, exist for well over a century, they have gained prominence since they became the main international public policy response to the Lehman crisis of making over-the-counter derivative transactions safer. This G20's response to the Lehman crisis of making central clearing mandatory for standardized over-the-counter derivative transactions has been translated into law, Dodd-Frank for the US and EMIR for the EU. However, CCPs remain to some extent controversial with adversaries claiming that they potentially increase systemic risk and proponents viewing them as systemic risk reducing when properly designed and maintained. In this article I review the booming literature on CCPs, of which about 60% is published in the last five years, by asking five fundamental questions about CCPs. The aim is to construct a broad, academically substantiated, synthesis about CCPs and to propose directions for future research in what can be considered as the most important niche of financial economics.