U.S. banks have increasingly diversified into activities traditionally considered as non-core for the banking sector. This paper investigates whether diversification influences banks' investment (credit) policy and profitability. Diversified banks appear to benefit from “coinsurance,” supply...

We develop a methodology to measure the capital shortfall of commercial banks in a market downturn, which we call stressed expected loss (SEL). We simulate a market downturn as a negative shock on interest rate and credit market risk factors that reflect the banks' market-sensitive assets. We...

We propose a reduced form model for the Minskian dynamics of liquidity and of asset prices in terms of the so-called financial accelerator mechanism. In a nutshell, credit creation is driven by the market value of the financial assets employed as collateral in the bank loans. This leads to a...

This papers studies the CDS-bond basis, i.e. a measure of price discrepancies between CDS and bonds spreads, for a sample of investment-graded US firms. Results show that during the 2007/09 financial crisis the basis was time varying and negatively correlated to: the "Libor-OIS" spread, a proxy...