We show theoretically that a proportional Ramp;D subsidy accelerates innovation activity at all degrees of competition in the modern Schumpeterian growth model, but less so at high degrees of competition. We then use company-level data on patenting activity, product market competition and Ramp;D...

Extending a standard credit-risk model illustrates that a single factor can drive both expected losses and the extent to which they may be exceeded in extreme scenarios, ie “unexpected losses.” This leads us to develop a framework for forecasting these losses jointly. In an application to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We assess the benefits of using frequency-domain information for active portfolio management. To do so, we forecast the bond risk premium and equity risk premium using a methodology that isolates frequencies (of the predictors) with the highest predictive power. The resulting forecasts are more...

We extract cycles in the term spread (TMS) and study their role for predicting the equity risk premium (ERP) using linear models. The low frequency component of the TMS is a strong and robust out-of-sample ERP predictor. It obtains out-of-sample R-squares (versus the historical mean benchmark)...

We show that the out-of-sample forecast of the equity risk premium can be significantly improved by taking into account the frequency-domain relationship between the equity risk premium and several potential predictors. We consider fifteen predictors from the existing literature, for the...