The internal ratings based approach (IRB Approach) was created as part of Basel II replacing the original Basle Accord of 1988 (Basle I) in an effort to create a better framework for regulating bank capital. This paper covers the methodology and components of the IRB Approach used to determine...

This work empirically examines six structural models of the term structure of credit risk spreads: Merton (1974), Longstaff & Schwartz (1995) (with and without stochastic interest rates), Leland & Toft (1996), Collin-Dufresne & Goldstein (2001), and a constant elasticity of variance model. The...

This paper uses an exclusive proprietary data set of European Credit Derivatives and VIX markets, covering a sample of 5 to 7 years, to study the nature of the theoretical link between credit risk and market risk, originally postulated in the work of Merton. This allows us to establish...

Modern risk management systems were developed in the early 1990s to provide centralized risk measures at the top level of financial institutions. These are based on a century of theoretical developments in risk measures. In particular, value at risk (VAR) has become widely used as a statistical...

The evolution of the spreads between unsecured money market rates of various maturities and central banks’ key policy rates has been subject to considerable debate and controversy in relation to the worldwide financial market turbulence that started in August 2007. Our contribution to the...

Between 2000 and 2002, the American Federal Open Market Committee has strongly decreased its target rate. This decrease, associated with external economic factors as well as innovative financial practices has influenced investors’ behaviour. In this paper, we analyze the financial causes of...

Several studies have reported how new credit risk transfer vehicles have made it easier to reallocate large amounts of credit risk from the financial sector to the non-financial sector of the capital markets. In this article, we describe one of these new credit risk transfer vehicles, the...

Considering the importance of credit risk management to ensure the financial system stability, the paper presents financial and real sector interaction highlighting that credit growth based on increase of credit demand, of income, of assets prices, of currency availability, the interest rate...

The paper analyses the empirical relationship between bank risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area. Using structural VAR with daily financial markets data for 2003-13, the analysis confirms two-way causality between shocks to sovereign risk and bank risk, with the former being overall...

This paper analyzes how combining firms into either groups or conglomerates affects their credit standing, as measured by their de- fault probabilities, recovery rates and credit spreads. Each combina- tion offers protection against default to its affiliates, and issues debt to optimize the...