On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

Rating downgrades are known to make subsequent downgrades more likely. We analyze the impact of this ?downward momentum? on credit portfolio risk. Using S&P ratings from 1996 to 2005, we estimate a transition matrix that is insensitive to and a second matrix that is sensitive to previous...

In this paper we 'update' the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second, it is...

“Arbitrage CDOs” have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles...

Group-specific estimations can significantly improve the predictive power of accountingbased rating models. This is shown using a binary logistic regression model applied to the Deutsche Bundesbank's USTAN dataset, which contains 300,000 financial statements provided by German companies for the...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

This paper attempts to identify and evaluate the main determinants of venture capital (VC). We develop a theoretical model where macroeconomic conditions, technological opportunity, and the entrepreneurial environment affect the demand and supply of VC. The quantitative results, based on a panel...

This paper attempts to evaluate the macroeconomic impact of venture capital (VC). We test the assumption that VC is similar in several respects to business R&D performed by large firms and therefore contributes to economic growth through two main channels: innovation and absorptive capacity. The...

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...