This paper provides evidence for regulatory arbitrage within the class of assetbacked securities (ABS) based on individual asset holding data of German banks. I find that those banks operating with tight regulatory constraints pick the securities with the highest yield and lowest collateral...

We show that banks' risk exposure in one asset category affects how they report regulatory risk weights for another asset category. Specifically, banks report lower credit risk weights for their loan portfolio when they face higher risk exposure in their trading book. This relationship is...

The internal ratings-based (IRB) approach maps bank risk profiles more adequately than the standardized approach. After switching to IRB, banks' risk-weighted asset (RWA) densities are thus expected to diverge, especially across countries with different supervisory strictness and risk levels....

Regulatory capital for trading book positions includes two components that cover different risks but apply to the same portfolio, one for market risk and one for credit risk. Similar approaches are common in banks’ internal models for economic capital. Although it is known that joint market...

M-PRESS-CreditRisk is a new top-down macro stress testing framework that can help supervisors gauge banks' capital adequacy related to credit risk. For the first time, it combines calibration of microprudential capital requirements and macroprudential buffers in a unified, coherent framework....

Our paper addresses firm size as a driver of systematic credit risk in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Key contributions are the use of a unique data set of SME lending by over 400 German banks and relating systematic risk to the size dependence of regulatory capital requirements....

Increases in firm default risk raise the default probability of banks while decreasing output and inflation in US data. To rationalize the empirical evidence, we analyse firm risk shocks in a New Keynesian model where entrepreneurs and banks engage in a loan contract and both are subject to...

The recent banking crisis has revealed the existence of strong resiliency factors in the retail banking business model. On average, retail banks suffered less than other financial institutions from unexpected market changes. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure retail banks’...

We introduce a novel simulation-based network approach, which provides full-edged distributions of potential interbank losses. Based on those distributions we propose measures for (i) systemic importance of single banks, (ii) vulnerability of single banks, and (iii) vulnerability of the whole...