Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the ‘Big Five’ crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used...

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...

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...

The developed world exhibits substantial but poorly understood differences in the efficiency and quality of low-value payment services. This paper compares payments arrangements in the UK, Norway, Swe-den, and Finland, and discusses the impact of network effects on incentives to adopt new...

Using a spatial competition model of retail payment networks, this paper discusses the likely economic consequences associated with the formation of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The model considers an expansion of positive network externalities on the demand side and adjustment cost on...

This paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function. In our model, point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics, such as capital and liquidity. We...

Banks’ holding of reasonable capital buffers in excess of minimum requirements could alleviate the procyclicality problem potentially exacerbated by the rating-sensitive capital charges of Basel II. Determining the required buffer size is an important risk management issue for banks, which the...