Portfolio credit risk measurement is greatly affected by data constraints, especially when focusing on loans given to unlisted firms. Standard methodologies adopt convenient, but not necessarily properly specified parametric distributions or simply ignore the effects of macroeconomic shocks on...

This paper studies the evolution of non-financial corporate debt among publicly listed companies in major advanced economies between 2010 and 2017. Since 2010, firms have started to rely more on corporate bond markets and have used part of their debt to increase their holdings of cash. In our...

Are assets in a landlocked country subject to sea-level rise risk? In this paper, we study the cross-border spillovers of physical climate risks through international trade and supply chain linkages. As we base our findings on historical data between 1970 and 2018, we observe that globalization...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) models often are used to estimate the equity investment that is required to limit the default rate on funding debt. Typical VaR ""buffer stock"" capital calculations produce biased estimates. To ensure accuracy, VaR must be modified by: (1) measuring loss relative to initial...

This paper reviews the rules in place in selected countries to limit risk concentrations in the credit portfolio. The paper focuses on a number of issues suggested by international organizations for countries and bank supervisors to consider in imposing standards for risk diversification in the...

Counterparty risk in the United States stemming from exposures to OTC derivatives payables (after netting) is now concentrated in five banks?Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citi. This note analyzes how such risks have shifted over the past year. We estimate that the...

We explore empirically how the time-varying allocation of credit across firms with heterogeneous credit quality matters for financial stability outcomes. Using firm-level data for 55 countries over 1991-2016, we show that the riskiness of credit allocation, captured by Greenwood and Hanson...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 recession on capital structure of publicly listed U.S. firms. Our estimates suggest leverage (Net Debt/Asset) decreased by 5.3 percentage points from the pre-shock mean of 19.6 percent, while debt maturity increased moderately. This de-leveraging effect is...

This paper studies episodes in which aggregate bank credit contracts alongside expanding economic activity-credit reversals. Using data for 179 countries during 1960-2017, the paper finds that reversals are a relatively common phenomenon--on average, they occur every five years. By comparison,...