The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between bank characteristics,in particular value, performance and volatility of bank stock returns, and its exposure to financial derivative contracts. The study is based on 109 publicly traded European banks over the period from 2005...

Although the probability of default (PD) modeling has reached a great maturity in both academia and business, for the Italian case we demonstrate that banks' available PD models would be misleading if today applied directly to Italian banks. We argue that what determines the PD of Italian banks,...