Microcredit, a financial tool providing uncollateralized loans to low-income individuals, has seen a shift from joint-liability (JL) to individual liabil- ity (IL) lending models. This article tests a theory explaining this shift, focusing on borrowers matching into groups exposed to similar...

CDS spreads are often used as market's view of credit risk. There is no popular alternative to it; perhaps only the distance-to-default measure based on Merton (1974) comes close to it. In this paper we investigate the relationship between these two measures for large European banks in post...

Motivated by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 several papers have provided explanations for why liquidity may dry up during market stress. This paper also looks at this issue but focuses on the question as to why the liquidity crunch was not uniform across maturities. As funding pressures were...

This study investigates the bank competition-stability nexus using a unique regulatory dataset provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank over the period 1994 to 2010. First, we use outright bank defaults as the most direct measure of bank risk available and contrast the results to weaker forms of bank...

We investigate financial intermediaries’ interest rate risk management as the simultaneous decision of on-balance-sheet exposure and interest rate swap use. Our findings show that both decisions are substitute risk management strategies. A higher likelihood of bank distress makes banks reduce...

The subprime crisis revealed that the adoption of suitable systems for the management of credit risk is of utmost concern. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2009) advises banks to use credit portfolio models with caution when assessing the capital adequacy. This paper investigates...

We show that credit supply shocks have a strong impact on firm-level as well as aggregate investment by applying the methodology developed by Amiti and Weinstein (2013) to a rich dataset of matched bank-firm loans in the Portuguese economy for the period 2005 to 2013. We argue that their...

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...

Reverse stress tests are a relatively new stress test instrument that aims at finding exactly those scenarios that cause a bank to cross the frontier between survival and default. Afterward, the scenario which is most probable has to be identified. This paper sketches a framework for a...

Excessive credit creation by banks was at the root of the recent financial crisis. Nevertheless, micro-prudential regulation lacks a clear methodology to identify these banks. Combining arguments from banking and auction theory, we show that overoptimism causes excessive lending, subsequently...