This paper provides an overview of stress-testing methodologies in Europe, with a focus on the advancements made by the European Central Bank's Financial Stability Committee Working Group on Stress Testing (WGST). Over a four-year period, the WGST played a pivotal role in refining stress-testing...

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...

We show that banks' risk exposure in one asset category affects how they report regulatory risk weights for another asset category. Specifically, banks report lower credit risk weights for their loan portfolio when they face higher risk exposure in their trading book. This relationship is...

The internal ratings-based (IRB) approach maps banks’ risk profiles more adequately than the standardized approach. After switching to IRB, banks’ risk-weighted asset (RWA) densities are thus expected to diverge, especially across countries with different supervisory strictness and risk...

The internal ratings-based (IRB) approach maps bank risk profiles more adequately than the standardized approach. After switching to IRB, banks' risk-weighted asset (RWA) densities are thus expected to diverge, especially across countries with different supervisory strictness and risk levels....

With the Great Recession and the regulatory reform that followed, the search for reliable means to capture systemic risk and to detect macrofinancial problems has become a central concern. In the United States, this concern has been institutionalized through the Financial Stability Oversight...

The United States is now committed to using two relatively sophisticated approaches to measuring capital adequacy: Basel III and stress tests. This paper shows how stress testing could mitigate weaknesses in the way Basel III measures credit and interest rate risk, the way it measures bank...

The Basel capital adequacy ratios lost credibility with financial markets during the crisis. This paper argues that failure was the result of the reliance of the Basel standards on overstated asset values in reported equity capital. The United States' stress tests were able to assist in...

The subprime crisis revealed that the adoption of suitable systems for the management of credit risk is of utmost concern. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2009) advises banks to use credit portfolio models with caution when assessing the capital adequacy. This paper investigates...

M-PRESS-CreditRisk is a new top-down macro stress testing framework that can help supervisors gauge banks' capital adequacy related to credit risk. For the first time, it combines calibration of microprudential capital requirements and macroprudential buffers in a unified, coherent framework....