Leverage is one of the key underlying features of banks' balance sheets. Traditionally, leverage arises directly through the use of deposited funds or other balance-sheet items, such as bonds and credit lines, as a supplementary tool of banks' equity capital in financing fresh loans and...

This paper analyzes the determinants and consequences of using a new option under IFRS to reclassify financial instruments from fair value categories to categories measured at cost or amortized cost. Many critics blamed fair value accounting as a reason or at least a catalyst of the ongoing...

A crucial condition for the existence of a credit channel through bank loans is that monetary policy should be able to change bank loan supply. This paper contributes to the discussion on this issue by presenting empirical evidence from dynamic panel estimations based on a dataset that comprises...

Capital requirements play a key role in the supervision and regulation of banks. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is now changing the current framework by introducing risk-sensitive capital charges. There have been concerns that this will unduly increase volatility in the banks'...

Instruments for credit risk transfer arise endogenously from and interact with optimizing behavior of their users. This is particularly true with credit derivatives which are usually OTC contracts between banks as buyers and sellers of credit risk. Recent literature, however, does not account...

In contrast to earlier field studies, we survey German public savings banks on their management of capital. We find that the most important determinants of the savings banks? target capital ratio are risk aversion, the desired credit growth and profitability. Savings banks prefer to manage the...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters' push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...