Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to increased performance and therefore greater safety on the part of banks as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks' profitability and their portfolio...

Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks? profitability (ROA) and their portfolio...

In this article, a risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC) valuation scheme for loans is derived. The critical assumption throughout the article is that no market information on a borrower's credit quality like bond or CDS (Credit Default Swap) spreads is available. Therefore, market-based...

In the last two decades, both internal and external risk management of banks have undergone significant developments. Banking supervision encourages banks to use a risk-based approach for computing minimum regulatory capital. Accounting rules have been tightened requiring more timely loss...

How to forecast next year's portfolio-wide credit default rate based on last year's default observations and the current score distribution? A classical approach to this problem consists of fitting a mixture of the conditional score distributions observed last year to the current score...

The impact of a stress scenario of default events on the loss distribution of a credit portfolio can be assessed by determining the loss distribution conditional on these events. While it is conceptually easy to estimate loss distributions conditional on default events by means of Monte Carlo...