The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

We study the role of household saving behaviour, of individual motives for saving and that of perceived liquidity constraints in 15 Euro Area countries. The empirical analysis is based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a new harmonized data set collecting detailed information on...

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns,...

This paper introduces a stress test of the corporate credit portfolios of 24 large German banks by a two-stage approach: First, a macro-econometric model is used to forecast the impact of a substantial increase of the user cost of business capital for firms worldwide on three particularly...

In this paper we stress-test credit portfolios of 28 German banks based on a Mertontype multi-factor credit risk model. The ad-hoc stress scenario is an economic downturn in the automobile industry that constitutes an exceptional but plausible event suggested by historical data. Rather than on a...

In the work of the Basel Committee there has been a tradition of distinguishing market from credit risk and to treat both categories independently in the calculation of risk capital. In practice positions in a portfolio depend simultaneously on both market and credit risk factors. In this case,...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreads of a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities of default (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. The time profile and overall...

In credit risk modelling, the correlation of unobservable asset returns is a crucial component for the measurement of portfolio risk. In this paper, we estimate asset correlations from monthly time series of Moody's KMV asset values for around 2,000 European firms from 1996 to 2004. We compare...

Results from portfolio models for credit risk tell us that loan concentration in certain industry sectors can substantially increase the value-at-risk (VaR). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether a tractable "infection model" can provide a meaningful estimate of the impact of...

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...