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...

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...

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...

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...

The global financial crisis of 2007–2008 has given rise to new regulatory initiatives to put restrictions on the size and the term of bankers' pay. We revisit both theoretically and empirically the question of whether these regulations are justified. We model bonuses as a series of sequential...

Failure in bank corporate governance has been seen as a contributing factor to excessive risk-taking pre-crisis with devastating implications as risks realised during the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on the impact of managerial incentives on bank crisis performance is...

We model a banker's future bonuses as a series of call options on the bank's profits and show that bonus caps and deferrals reduce risk-taking. However, the banker's optimal risk-taking also depends on the costs of risk-taking. We calibrate the model to US banking data and show that lengthening...