Our paper addresses firm size as a driver of systematic credit risk in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs …). Key contributions are the use of a unique data set of SME lending by over 400 German banks and relating systematic risk to … particularly rich and well developed credit market for SMEs in Germany. We estimate asset correlations as the key measure of …

This paper investigates the incentives for banks to bias their internally generated risk estimates. We are able to … by low-capital banks to improve regulatory ratios. At the portfolio level, the difference in borrower probability of … credits. In addition, we find that low-capital banks' risk estimates have less explanatory power than those of high …