Stress testing has become a crucial point on the Basel II agenda, mainly as Pillar I estimatesdo not explicitly take portfolio concentration into account. We start from the credit portfolioof the German pension insurer being a cross-sectional representation of the German economyand subsequently...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS marketcaused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline inthe CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect whicharises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...

The last two decades witnessed fundamental changes in the financial sectors ofindustrialized economies. Deregulation, the removal of entry barriers, the developmentof new financial products and services and technological change continue tospur structural changes in the financial industry. This...

In this paper we investigate the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risktype, which can be thought of as market risk. Combining Merton-like factor models forcredit risk with linear factor models for market risk, we analytically calculate their interriskcorrelation and show how...

Competitive shocks can erode the customer base and thus the information pool of banks. Inferiorinformation quality also reduces the quality of borrowers and may lead to financial instability ofbanks and corporates if risk taking is excessive. Recent theories conjecture that banks can mitigatethe...

Like all the member states of the European Union, Slovenia was also obligated to implement EUDirectives 2006/48/EC and 2006/49/EC into national banking legislative. Basel II rules were implementedinto Slovenian legislative in December 2006 and have been valid from 1st of January 2007. Before...

One of the greatest challenges in modeling credit portfolio risk is the issue of correlations between borrowers.Up to now no consistent methodology for identifying correlations exists. In general two approachesare employed: “direct” and “indirect” modeling. While the former specify...

With the New Basle Capital Accord banks’ capital requirements are determined with risk weights based on internaland external ratings and probabilities of default (PD’s). PD’s are mostly estimated from historical defaultrates. In recent working papers the Basle Committee on Banking...

Building on the ‘law and economics’ literature, this paper analyses corporategovernance implications of debt financing in an environment where a dominant owner isable to extract ex ante ‘private benefits of control’. Ownership concentration may result inlower efficiency, measured as a...

Banking regulators often practice forbearance and ambiguity in insolvency resolutions. The paperexamines the effects of regulatory forbearance and ambiguity in a context of allocational efficiency.Bailouts, liquidations and their stochastic policy mix lead to suboptimal allocations if banks do...