High bank leverage is commonly considered a major threat to financial stability. We build a structural credit model to calculate the optimal leverage for a bank that provides asset backed loans, such as corporate loans and mortgages. The bank's assets are loans, which means that the bank's...

Banks have access to different markets for credit risk transfer (CRT), including the credit derivative and the secondary loan markets. We investigate how and why a bank chooses among these markets to hedge the credit risk of a loan. We find that banks with capital and liquidity constraints are...