A puzzle posed by the subprime crisis is that even though financial development has made traditional bank assets less opaque, the opacity of banks themselves seems to have increased. This paper offers an explanation. I show that financial development which reduces the opacity of bank assets can...

Recent literature (Boyd and De Nicoloacute;, 2005) has argued that competition in the loan market lowers bank risk by reducing the risk-taking incentives of borrowers. We show that the impact of loan market competition on banks is reversed if banks can adjust their loan portfolios. The reason is...

A main cause of the ongoing financial crisis is the various ways through which banks have transferred credit risk in the financial system. In this paper we study the riskiness of banks that have used these methods, as perceived by the market. For this we analyze a sample of banks that trade...

We propose a new method for measuring the quality of banks' credit portfolios. This method makes use of information embedded in bank share prices by exploiting differences in their sensitivity to credit default swap spreads of borrowers of varying quality. The method allows us to derive a credit...

This paper examines the relation between the new markets for credit default swaps (CDS) and banks' pricing of syndicated loans to U.S. corporates. We find that changes in CDS spreads have a significantly positive coefficient and explain about 25% of subsequent monthly changes in aggregate loan...

One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyse the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behaviour of a...

One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyze the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behavior of a...

In this paper, we study the impact of credit risk transfer (CRT) on the stability and the efficiency of a financial system in a model with endogenous intermediation and production. Our analysis suggests that with respect to CRT, the individual incentives of the agents in the economy are...