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...

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...

Der genossenschaftliche FinanzVerbund und die Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe werden als Netzwerke durch die aus der Förderalismustheorie entlehnten Kriterien für netzwerkorientierte Güter auf verschiedenen Ebenen analysiert. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich unter anderem, dass die Konsolidierung im...

We investigate the relationship between real estate markets and bank distress among German universal and specialized mortgage banks between 1995 and 2004. Higher house prices increase the value of collateral, which reduces the probability of bank distress (PDs). But higher prices at given rents...

In this paper we stress-test credit portfolios of 28 German banks based on a Mertontype multi-factor credit risk model. The ad-hoc stress scenario is an economic downturn in the automobile industry that constitutes an exceptional but plausible event suggested by historical data. Rather than on a...

The main challenge of forecasting credit default risk in loan portfolios is forecasting the default probabilities and the default correlations. We derive a Merton-style threshold-value model for the default probability which treats the asset value of a firm as unknown and uses a factor model...

In this paper we focus on the analysis of the effect of prediction and estimation risk on the loss distribution, risk measures and economic capital. When variables for the determination of probability of default and loss distribution have to be predicted because they are not available at the...