Some financial failures occur when people don't understand the risks they take. Others are simply bad luck. But the most important cases happen when private risks have an extra social aspect.

Estimates of average default probabilities for borrowers assigned to each of a financial institution's internal credit risk rating grades are crucial inputs to portfolio credit risk models. Such models are increasingly used in setting financial institution capital structure, in internal control...

Now in prospect is a major revision of international bank capital regulations that would embody recent advances in credit risk measurement and management. Previous regulations have been simpler in structure, with a primary goal of getting capital requirements right on average, and thus have...

The question of whether private investors can rationally discriminate between the risk taken by banks is empirically investigated by testing the risk sensitivity of European banks' subordinated notes and debentures (SND) spreads. A unique dataset of issuance spreads, issues and issuers rating,...

In this paper we conduct a specification analysis of structural credit risk models, using term structure of credit default swap (CDS) spreads and equity volatility from high-frequency return data. Our study provides consistent econometric estimation of the pricing model parameters and...

The striking growth of credit derivatives suggests that market participants find them to be useful tools for risk management. I illustrate the value of credit derivatives with three examples. A commercial bank can use credit derivatives to manage the risk of its loan portfolio. An investment...