Individual loans contain a bundle of risks including credit risk and interest rate risk. This paper focuses on the general issue of banks’ management of these various risks in a model with costly loan monitoring and convex taxes. The results suggest that if the hedge is not subject to basis...

The group of duration models has grown rapidly during last years, offering manynew approaches for interest rate risk management in delta or delta-gamma frameworks.This paper attempts to make up for the lack of empirical evidence concerning theperformance of some of the most realistic duration...

We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) vs. diversification on the return and the risk of banks using data from 105 Italian banks over the period 1993–1999. Specifically, we analyze the tradeoffs between (loan portfolio) focus and diversification using a unique data set that...

BankCaR is a credit risk model that forecasts the distribution of a commercial bank's charge-offs. The distribution depends only on systematic factors; BankCaR takes each bank and projects its expected charge-off across a distribution of good years and bad years. Since most bank failures occur...

This paper examines the impact of mergers on default risk, finding that, on average, a merger increases the default risk of the acquiring firm. This is surprising for two reasons: risk reduction is among the reasons commonly cited for mergers, and asset diversification should reduce default risk...