The Basel credit-to-GDP gap is the single most popular measure of excessive credit growth and the financial cycle in general. It is based, however, on a purely statistical understanding of excessiveness: Growth is excessive if the credit-to-GDP ratio (i.e. the ratio of credit to nominal GDP) is...

The severity function approach (abbreviated SFA) is a method of selecting adverse scenarios from a multivariate density. It requires the scenario user (e.g. an agency that runs banking sector stress tests) to specify a "severity function", which maps candidate scenarios into a scalar severity...

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...

This paper uses sovereign CDS spread changes and their volatilities as a proxy for the informational efficiency of the sovereign markets and persistency of country risks. Specifically, we apply semi-parametric and parametric methods to the sovereign CDSs of 10 eurozone countries to test the...

This paper introduces a new transmission channel of banking crises where sizable cross-border bank claims on foreign countries with high domestic crisis risk enable contagion to the home economy. This asset-side channel opposes traditional views that see banking crises originating from either...

This paper compares the out-of-sample predictive performance of different early warning models for systemic banking crises using a sample of advanced economies covering the past 45 years. We compare a benchmark logit approach to several machine learning approaches recently proposed in the...

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...

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...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...