The new Basel II regulation contains a number of new regulatory features. Most importantly, internal ratings will be given a central role in the evaluation of the riskiness of bank loans. Another novelty is that retail credit and loans to small and medium-sized enterprises will receive a special...

A drawback of available portfolio credit risk models is that they fail to allow for default risk dependency across loans other than through common risk factors. Thereby, thesemodels ignore that close ties can exist between companies due to legal, financial and business relations. In this paper,...

The Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach for capital determination is one of the cornerstones in the proposed revision of the Basel Committee rules for bank regulation. We evaluate the IRB approach using historical business loan portfolio data from a major Swedish bank for the period 1994 to...