A paper presented at the October 2003 conference quot;Beyond Pillar 3 in International Banking Regulation: Disclosure and Market Discipline of Financial Firms,quot; cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia...

We analyse EU banks' equity market-based distances-to-default and subordinated bond spreads in the secondary market in relation to their capability of signalling a material weakening in banks' financial condition. Both indicators are demonstrated to be complete indicators of bank fragility,...

We analyse the ability to the distance-to-default and bond spreads to signal bank fragility. We show that both indicators are complete and unbiased and that spreads are non-linear in the probability of bank default. We empirically test these properties in a sample of EU banks. We find leading...