We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor’s over the period 1980-2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

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...

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...

In 2015, 70% of newly-issued leveraged loans had weaker enforcement features, called covenant-light or "cov-lite;" this is nearly a three-time increase in cov-lite issuance compared to a previous peak in 2007. We evaluate whether this development can be attributed to market overheating, increased...

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...

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...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide the analytics and robustness of the relationship between default correlations. We show that loans with higher default probabilities will not only have higher variances but also higher correlations between loans. As a consequence,...

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...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide theanalytics and robustness of the relationship between defaultprobabilities and default correlations. We show that loans with higherdefault probabilities will not only have higher variances but also highercorrelations with other...

Entgegen früherer Studien, die darauf hinweisen, dass der gesamte Credit Spread eines Bonds durchdas mit diesem Bond verbundene Kreditrisiko induziert ist, zeigen neuere empirische Untersuchungen,dass neben Kreditrisiken noch weitere Faktoren die Höhe des Credit Spreads determinieren.Die...