We examine the joint optimization of financial leverage and irreversible capacity investment in a real options framework with risky debt and endogenous interest costs. Higher capacity, ceteris paribus, increases operating leverage and default probability, but lowers ex post adjustment costs and...

We provide evidence that a weak banking sector has contributed to low productivity growth following the European sovereign debt crisis. An unexpected increase in capital requirements for a subset of Portuguese banks in 2011 provides a natural experiment to study the effects of reduced bank...

We show that bank lending standards are influenced by macroeconomic conditions. We use monthly data from the Banco de España Central Credit Register, which allow us to monitor all loan applications made by non-financial firms to non-current banks from 2002 to 2015. To test the pro-cyclicality...

This study extends the literature on the determinants of NPL. I investigate whether banks anticipate non-performing loans by making balance sheet adjustments. This study draws insights into the actions taken by credit risk management teams and bank managers to minimize the size of non-performing...

This paper presents the results of an analysis of data on individual bank loans of nonfinancial 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...

Contingent Convertibles (“CoCos”) are contingent capital instruments which convert into shares, or have a principal write down, if a trigger event takes place. CoCos exhibit the undesirable so-called death-spiral effect: by actively hedging the equity risk, investors can (unintentionally)...

This paper investigates the relationship between the two major sources of bank default risk: liquidity risk and credit risk. We use a sample of virtually all US commercial banks during the period 1998–2010 to analyze the relationship between these two risk sources on the bank...

By employing Moody’s corporate default and rating transition data spanning the last 90years we explore how much capital banks should hold against their corporate loan portfolios to withstand historical stress scenarios. Specifically, we will focus on the worst case scenario over the...

How do markets for debt cash flow rights, with and without accompanying control rights, affect the efficiency of lending? A bank makes a loan, learns if it needs monitoring, and then decides whether to lay off credit risk. The bank can transfer credit risk by either selling the loan or buying a...

We investigate whether and how business credit information sharing helps to better assess the default risk of private firms. Private firms represent an ideal testing ground because they are smaller, more informationally opaque, riskier, and more dependent on trade credit and bank loans than...