In the recent financial crisis, risk management tools have been proven inadequate. Model risk, a key component of bank risk, has shown its negative impact. It seems that risk models did not cover the included risks comprehensively and were not kept up-to-date by banks, and also rating agencies....

We propose a worldwide-based loan portfolio to measure banks’ sectoral concentration that features prominently in episodes of bank specialization. We use the banks’ real loan allocation worldwide instead of the in-sample data to compute a bank specialization. We find that firms borrowing...

I use an accounting reform to assess the agency cost of debt in diversified firms. Firms that switch from single-to-multisegment following the reform suffer a 12% increase in the bond spread than their standalone peers. Consistent with lenders anticipating underinvestment and asset substitution...

As supply chain channels physical, financial, and information flows as well as associated risks, a firm’s supply chain information should be helpful in understanding and predicting its credit risks. Credit ratings as an approximate but important measure of corporate credit risks have been...

Corporate governance law in the United States played a central role in the subprime debacle. Specifically, CEOs exercised sufficient autonomy to garner huge compensation payments based upon illusory income. Instead of profits, firms absorbed huge risks. The economic losses arising from this...

Stress testing has become a crucial point on the Basel II agenda, mainly as Pillar I estimatesdo not explicitly take portfolio concentration into account. We start from the credit portfolioof the German pension insurer being a cross-sectional representation of the German economyand subsequently...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS marketcaused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline inthe CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect whicharises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...

In this paper, we measure the impact of a downturn in the automobile industry on thesolvency of 28 large German banks. The choice of the stressed sector is motivated by theimportant role which the automobile industry plays in the German economy, not the leastbecause of its close ties to other...

In this paper we investigate the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risktype, which can be thought of as market risk. Combining Merton-like factor models forcredit risk with linear factor models for market risk, we analytically calculate their interriskcorrelation and show how...

We analyze collateralized loan obligation (CLO) transactions by European banks(1997 - 2004), trying to identify firm-specific and macroeconomic factors influencing aninstitution’s securitization decision. CLO issuance seems to be an appropriate fundingtool for large banks with high risk and...