Under the new Basel II regulatory framework, the need for an effective risk-adjusted pricing mechanism has become even more central in banking than in the past: banks are spurred to develop risk-adjusted measures, to avoid wasteful customers' cross-subsidization and support the value creation...

Choosing a proper external risk measure is of great regulatory importance, as exemplified in the Basel II and Basel III Accord which use Value-at-Risk (VaR) with scenario analysis as the risk measures for setting capital requirements. We argue a good external risk measure should be robust with...

Since 2008, catastrophic losses and financial turmoil have deeply shaken the insurance and reinsurance industries. Severe difficulties encountered by sector leaders like AIG and Swiss Re have shed light on the potential fragility of the players, and have increased attention on the subject of...

Identifying the relevant risk factors and their interdependence is central to understanding the risk exposures and vulnerabilities of a financial institution. It is needed for risk management, solvency assessment and stress testing. We assemble a unique dataset of risk factors relevant for...

We present a model where bank assets are a portfolio of risky debt claims and analyze stockholders' risk-taking behavior while considering the strategic interaction between debtors and creditors. We find that: (1) as the leverage of a bank increases, risk shifting by borrowers increases, even if...

We present a stochastic simulation forecasting model for stress testing aimed at assessing banks' capital adequacy, financial fragility and probability of default. The paper provides a theoretical presentation of the methodology and the essential features of the forecasting model on which it is...

We present an empirical study of stress testing for portfolios of auto loans. We find that loans aged five years or more have significantly higher default probabilities. This finding raises concerns about the increasing maturity of auto loans in recent years. A challenge in stress testing is the...

I test the market discipline of bank risk hypothesis by examining whether banks choose risk management policies that account for the risk preferences of subordinated debt holders. Using around 500,000 quarterly observations on the population of U.S. insured commercial banks over the 1995-2009...

We test five hypotheses on whether banks use CDS to hedge corporate loans, provide credit enhancements, obtain regulatory capital relief, and exploit banking relationship and private information. Using new data that link large banks' CDS positions and syndicated lending on individual firms, we...

Employing a unique and hand-collected sample of 648 true sale loan securitization transactions issued by 57 stock-listed banks across the EU-12 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper empirically analyzes the relationship between true sale loan securitization and the...