We analyze the effect of monetary policy on yield spreads between corporate bonds with different credit ratings over the business cycle. We use futures contracts to distinguish between expected and unexpected changes in the Fed funds target rate and several indicators to distinguish between...

Promoting credit services to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) has been a perennial challenge for policy makers globally due to high information costs. Recent fintech developments may be able to mitigate this problem. By leveraging big data or digital footprints on existing platforms,...

Credit risk measurement remains a critical field of top priority in banking finance, directly implicated in the recent global financial crisis. This paper examines the dynamic linkages between credit risk migration due to rating shifts and prevailing macroeconomic conditions, reflected in...

Purpose: This paper aims to offer an empirical study of the impact of institutional quality on the banking system risk and credit risk. Design/methodology/approach: Applying cross-sectional dependent tests and stationary tests to check the property of our sample, the panel corrected standard...

This paper proposes an early-warning bank risk measure based on the syndicate concentration of recent syndicated loans that a bank participates in. At the bank level, higher values of the measure predict greater risks (i.e., loan loss provisions, idiosyncratic return volatility, default...

In contrast to Robert Mundell‘s Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries – most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland...

In the post-WWII (since the 1950s), there have been over 400 banking, currency, and sovereign debt crises, which translates to about 10 crises per annum; furthermore, the combined cost of the last five crises since the late 1990s is in excess of $30 trillion, but when the cost of the COVID-19...

Regulators dedicate much attention to the option that financial institutions in distress have to transfer losses to their creditors. It is generally recognized that the existence of this option provides intermediaries with a powerful incentive to keep firm capital close to the minimal...

This paper examines capital adequacy regulation in Germany. After a short overview about financial regulation in Germany in general, the paper focuses on the most important development in the area of capital adequacy regulation from the 1930s up to the financial crisis. Two main trends are...