Over the period 2002 to 2003, Switzerland and the European Union (EU) were engaged in negotiations regarding banking secrecy. The EU's stated goal was for Switzerland to abolish banking secrecy. Switzerland refused and offered to impose a withholding tax on interest income instead. The two...

We analyse questions of arbitrage in financial markets in which asset prices change in time as stationary stochastic processes. The main focus of the paper is on a model where the price vectors are independent and identically distributed. In the framework of this model, we find conditions that...

We examine how asymmetric information and competition in the credit market affect voluntary information sharing between lenders. We study an experimental credit market in which information sharing can help lenders to distinguish goodborrowers from bad ones, because borrowers may exogenously...

This paper examines the impact of a public credit registry on the repayment behavior of borrowers. We implement an experimental credit market in which loan repayment is not third-party enforceable. We compare market outcome with a credit registry to that without a credit registry. This...

We examine the quantification of operational risk for banks. We adopt a financial-economics approach and interpret operational risk management as a means of optimizing the profitability of an institution along its value chain. We start by defining operational risk and then propose a...

We propose a simple and implementable model of credit contagion where we in-clude macro- and microstructural dependencies among the debtors within a creditportfolio. We show that, even for diversified portfolios, moderate microstructuraldependencies have already a significant impact on the tails...

We present a multi-period mean-variance optimization program which allows for a joint optimization of the balance and off-balance sheet. Our first finding is the proof of a conjecture of Li and Ng (cf. [LN00]), Leippold, Trojani and Vanini (cf. [LTV04], [LTV03]) about the equivalence of the...

In this paper operational risk are considered from a purely business or profitability point of view. We show for quantifiable operational risk that the three basic figures for profitability management - value, costs and risks - can be modelled such that an integrative point of view on...

Credit limit management is of paramount importance for successful short-term credit-risk management, even more so when the situation in credit and financial markets is tense. We consider a continuous-time model where the credit provider and the credit taker interact within a game-theoretic...

Economic cycles are the key credit portfolio risk driver and they are autocorrelated over time. We then show that it is economically meaningful to define risk for credit portfolios in a multi period setup. Since one period expected shortfall fails to measure risk adequately in a multi period...