The fixing of the Libor and Euribor benchmark rates has proven vulnerable to manipulation. Individual rate-setters may have incentives to fraudulently distort their submissions. For the contributing banks to collectively agree on the direction in which to rig the rate, however, their interests...

Loan loss reserves make up an essential part of a bank's soundness and more generally its viability. An under-provisioned reserve account implies that capital ratios may overstate a bank's ability to absorb future losses. For this reason, both supervisory authorities and investors regularly...

Stress tests have been increasingly used in recent years by regulators to foster confidence in the banking sector by not only increasing its resilience via mandatory capital increases but also by enhancing transparency to allow investors to better discriminate between banks. In this study, using...

The Great Recession has been characterised by the two stylized facts: the buildup of leverage in the household sector in the period preceding the recession and a protracted economic recovery that followed. We attempt to explain these two facts as an information friction, whereby agents are...

It is well known that Micro and Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the economy. Most of these companies use external financing sources like debt and equity capital to finance their activities. However, in general, in the area of SMEs' access to finance, there are...

We examine contagion from a number of financial systems to the German financial system using the information content of CDS prices in a GARCH model. After controlling for common factors which may cause comovement in security prices, we find evidence for contagion from the US and European...

We identify the connections between financial institutions from different sectors of the financial industry based on joint extreme movements in credit default swap (CDS) spreads. First, we estimate pairwise co-crash probabilities (CCP) to identify significant connections among 193 international...

We use a survey to identify a consumer bias with regard to different sources of debt-financing. Less salient debt may generate psychological benefits. This should be weighed against the possible economic costs of a sub-optimal capital structure; but low levels of financial literacy make it...

While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

The main objective of this paper is to determine if it is possible to find within the credit market any restrictions, for instance to credit concessions and its commercial conditions to more little firms or to those that do not have a strong relationship whit their usual banks, and, if the...