The present crisis has revealed that, as expected, much of the safety net for handling failures in the banking system is deficient, particularly for cross-border banks, and the present problems had to be handled by a range of ad hoc measures. The principal new measure that needs to be undertaken...

Basel II framework requires banks to conduct stress tests on their potential future minimum capital requirements and consider ‘at least the effect of mild recession scenarios’. We propose a stress testing framework for minimum capital requirements in which banks’ corporate credit risks are...

This paper analyses the determinants of banks’ loan loss allowances for samples of US banks and three non-US samples: a group of 21 countries, Canada and Japan. The model includes fundamental (or non-discretionary) determinants of the allowance such as non-performing loans, and discretionary...

In the discussion paper, we employ data on industry-specific corporate sector bankruptcies over the time period from 1986 to 2003 and estimate a macroeconomic credit risk model for the Finnish corporate sector. The sample period includes a severe recession with significantly higher-than-average...

This paper studies relationship lending in a framework where the cost of switching banks measures the degree of banking competition. The relationship lender’s (insider bank’s) informational advantage creates a lock-in effect, which is at its height when the switching cost is infinitesimal....

A Central Counterparty (CCP) is an entity that interposes itself between transacting counterparties – a seller vis-à-vis the original buyer and a buyer vis-à-vis the original seller – to guarantee execution of the transaction. Thus, the original transacting parties substitute their...

Tracing the SEC ban on the short selling of financial stocks in September 2008, this paper investigates whether such selling activity before the 2008 short ban reflected financial companies’ risk exposures in the subprime crisis. The evidence suggests that short sellers sold short stocks that...

On 3 July 2015, SUERF organized its sixth joint conference with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki on the subject of liquidity and market efficiency. The one-day program consisted of an opening speech, six presentations, including three keynotes, and a lunchtime address. The present SUERF Study...

It has been proposed that the potential procyclicality of Basel II could be alleviated by using through-the-cycle (TTC) ratings in IRBA models. A TTC rating would be based on the structural component of the debtor’s credit risk ignoring cyclical fluctuations. This paper tests for the existence...