One of the reasons for firms decentralising aspects of their operations is to enable managers to gain specialised knowledge of local conditions. For credit managers in a banking firm, this may take the form of knowledge of investment opportunities and the risk profiles of each of these...

All banks must hold capital equal to the minimum regulatory requirement. However, in many cases the level of regulatory capital diverges from the actual (economic) capital held by banks. A bank's actual capital is typically linked to a target credit rating, which is in turn determined by the...

Extreme value theory (EVT) is regularly put forward by academics, practitioners and banking regulators as a methodology for measuring the likelihood of operational risk losses that have a very low probability of occurrence, but which have the potential for catastrophic outcomes in terms of...

This paper develops a framework for examining the impact of changes in the solvency standard of a bank (target credit rating) on the pricing of bank assets. We show that the decision of a bank to increase its solvency standard increases the price of bank assets to the extent that a bank prices...