We use unique data on banks' private risk assessments of corporate borrowers to quantify how competition among banks affect the risk sensitivity of interest rates in the Norwegian credit market. We show that an increase in competition makes corporate lending rates less sensitive to banks' own...

Norges Bank has since 1989 been using a risk index for banks. The purpose of this risk index is to identify potential problem banks, and to obtain a general picture of the health of the banking industry. In 1994 the risk index was reconstructed based on research by Sigbjørn Atle Berg and Barbro...

The banking literature contains only a handful of studies of how bank revenues vary over the business cycle, and nearly all of these studies look exclusively on the net interest margin. The general conclusion has been that the margin tends to increase during recessions and decrease during booms....

While the new capital adequacy framework, Basel II, aims to make the banks' capital requirements more sensitive to the underlying risk of the assets, it may also introduce an additional source of procyclicality in the banking sector. A growing share of the literature has assessed the potential...