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...

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...

The value at risk measure attempts to summarize in a single number market value risk of a portfolio of financial assets.The paper focuses on the interaction between the solvency probability of a bank, on one hand, and the diversification potential of its portfolio, on the other hand, when...

When measuring market risk, credit institutions and Alternative Investment Fund Managers may deviate from equally weighting historical data in their Value-at-Risk calculation and instead use an exponential time series weighting. The use of exponential weighting in the Value-at-Risk calculation...

This note studies the risk-management decisions of a risk-averse farmer. The farmer faces multiple sources of price uncertainty. He sells commodities to two markets at two prices, but only one of these markets has a futures market. We show that the farmer's optimal commodity futures market...

The paper focuses on the interaction between the solvency probability of a banking firm and the diversification potential of its asset portfolio when determining optimal equity capital. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate value at risk (VaR) into the firm-theoretical model of a banking...