The industrial organization approach to the microeconomics of banking augmented by uncertainty and risk aversion is used to examine credit derivatives and macro derivatives as instruments to hedge credit risk for a large com- mercial bank. In a partial-analytic framework we distinguish between...

International and national investors are often exposed to real wealth risks, stemming from volatile asset prices and inflation uncertainty, making it difficult to stabilize consumption patterns. However, investors can enter futures markets to hedge against these risks. The paper develops a...

Using a two-moment decision model this paper analyzes corporate hedging behavior in the presence of unified and differential income taxation. We start with the well-known result that risk-taking may increase when income tax rates increase and, therefore, the incentive for hedging reduces. We...

Basel II changes risk management in banks strongly. Internal rating procedures would lead one to expect that banks are changing over to active risk control. But, if risk management is no longer a simple "game against nature", if all agents involved are active players then a shift from a...

We study the implications of the value at risk concept for the bank's optimum amount of equity capital under credit risk. The market value of loans is risky and lognormally distributed. We show that the required equity capital depends upon managerial and market factors. Furthermore, the bank's...