In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives for banks, depositors, and regulators in connection with bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based...

Correlated defaults and systemic risk are clearly priced in credit portfolio securities such as CDOs or index CDSs. In this paper we study an extensive CDX data set for evidence whether correlated defaults are also present in the underlying CDS market. We develop a cash flow based top-down...