This paper studies the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affliation and an extensive set of firm-specific factors. By using a panel data set for virtually all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990-2009, a period which...

In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal...

We show that collateral plays an important role in the design of debt contracts, the provision of credit, and the incentives of lenders to monitor borrowers. Using a unique dataset from a large bank containing timely assessments of collateral values, in conjunction with a legal reform that...

The financial crisis has ignited a debate about the appropriate objectives and the governance structure of Central Banks. We use novel survey data to investigate the relation between these traits and banking system stability focusing in particular on their role in micro-prudential supervision....

We study the specific corporate governance problems of central banks in their complex role of inflation guardians, bankers' banks, financial industry regulators/supervisors and, in some cases, competition authorities and deposit insurance agencies. We review the current institutional...

In this paper we empirically study interactions between real activity and the financial stance. Using aggregate data we examine a number of candidate measures of the financial stance of the economy. We find strong evidence for substantial spillover effects on aggregate activity from our...

The new Basel II regulation contains a number of new regulatory features. Most importantly, internal ratings will be given a central role in the evaluation of bank loans' riskiness. Another novelty is that retail credit and SME loans will receive a special treatment in recognition of the fact...

A drawback of available portfolio credit risk models is that they fail to allow for default risk dependency across loans other than through common risk factors. Thereby, these models ignore that close ties can exist between companies due to legal, financial and business relations. In this paper,...

Despite a surge in the research efforts put into modelling credit risk during the past decade, few studies have incorporated the impact that macroeconomic conditions have on business defaults. In this paper, we estimate a duration model to explain the survival time to default for borrowers in...