Universal banks can have control over borrowers by holding equity stakes in the borrower firm. Banks’ corporate control is likely to increase the likelihood of providing a future loan as they mitigate information asymmetry and agency costs of debt. Using panel data on Portuguese companies, we...

In this study, an assessment of the impact of Basel II capital requirement rules driven by credit risk of non-financial firms is performed. Intervals of variation for the risk drivers are established such that capital requirements for firms' credit risk under Basel II exceed capital requirements...

In this paper we study the implications of the absence of statistical arbitrage opportunities (SAO) in a two-period incomplete market economy where default is allowed but there are collateral requirements. We study the existence of state price deflators and the existence of a solution for the...

The paper presents an insolvency risk analysis of Portuguese companies with three techniques: logistic regression, discriminant analysis and support vector machines (SVM). It identifies the most critical predictors of default based on the accounting, employee and debt concentration data. A...

In this paper we explore the process of convergence to firms’ target leverage ratios. Using a unique dataset of micro, small, medium and large firms, we find that this process is very fast, most notably for smaller firms. We further explore these results by analyzing different convergence...

Using micro level data, this work characterizes the interest rate pass-through in loan and deposit retail rates of the Portuguese banking system. It concludes that the long-run impact of a change in money market rates on loans is typically around one while it is smaller than one for deposits....