Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...

Banks typically determine their capital levels by separately analysing credit and interest rate risk, but the interaction between the two is significant and potentially complex. We develop an integrated economic capital model for a banking book where all exposures are held to maturity. Our...

This paper investigates the relationship between short-term interest rates and bank risk. Using a unique database that includes quarterly balance sheet information for listed banks operating in the European Union and the United States in the last decade, we find evidence that unusually low...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...

Instruments for credit risk transfer arise endogenously from and interact with optimizing behavior of their users. This is particularly true with credit derivatives which are usually OTC contracts between banks as buyers and sellers of credit risk. Recent literature, however, does not account...

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...

Theory of financial intermediation gives contradicting answers to the question whether banks should diversify or focus their loan portfolios. Our aim is to find out which of the two strategies is predominant in the German banking market. To this end we measure diversification for all German...

The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology to estimate loss given default (LGD) and apply it to a set of micro-data of loans to SME and corporations of an anonymous commercial bank from Central Europe. LGD estimates are important inputs in the pricing of credit risk and the measurement of...

This article presents the results of stress tests of the Czech banking sector conducted using models of credit risk and credit growth broken down by sector. The use of these models enables the stress tests to be linked to the CNB's official quarterly macroeconomic forecast. In addition, the...

This paper presents the results of an analysis of data on individual bank loans of non-financial corporations in the Czech Republic taken from the CNB's Central Credit Register. It focuses on the question of how firms obtain financing from domestic banks. The results show that the vast majority...