Basel II changes risk management in banks strongly. Internal rating procedures would lead one to expect that banks are changing over to active risk control. But, if risk management is no longer a simple "game against nature", if all agents involved are active players then a shift from a...

We study the implications of the value at risk concept for the bank's optimum amount of equity capital under credit risk. The market value of loans is risky and lognormally distributed. We show that the required equity capital depends upon managerial and market factors. Furthermore, the bank's...

We examine monetary and fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. It is first shown that monetary uncertainty discourages excessive taxation and may thus reduce average inflation and output distortions. However, as countries enter...

The economic environment for financial institutions has become increasingly risky. Hence these institutions must find ways to manage risk of which one of the most important forms is interest rate risk. In this paper we use the mean-variance (mean-standard deviation) approach to examine a banking...

The paper focuses on the interaction between the solvency probability of a banking firm and the diversification potential of its asset portfolio when determining optimal equity capital. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate value at risk (VaR) into the firm-theoretical model of a banking...

The paper examines the optimal combination of central bank independence and conservatism in the presence of uncertain central bank preferences. We develop a model of endogenous monetary policy delegation in which government chooses the central bank's degree of inde-pendence and conservatism so...

We study how the optimal degree of conservatism relates to decision-making procedures in a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In our framework, central bank conservatism is required to attenuate the volatility of monetary decisions generated by the presence of uncertainty about the committee...