"Preface Second Edition The first edition of this book appeared eight years ago. Since then the banking industry experienced a lot of change and challenges. The most recent financial crisis which started around May 2007 and lasted in its core period until early 2009 gave rise for a lot of...

Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether or these cycles coincide. Recent papers_new suggest by their empirical research set-up that they do, or at least that defaults and credit...

We address the question to what extent a central bank can de-risk its balance sheet by unconventional monetary policy operations. To this end, we propose a novel risk measurement framework to empirically study the time-variation in central bank portfolio credit risks associated with such...