Loan loss provisions in the euro area are negatively related to GDP growth, i.e., they are procyclical. Loan loss provisions tend to be more procyclical at larger and better capitalized banks. The procyclicality of loan loss provisions can explain about two-thirds of the variation of bank...

This paper is the first to show that financial institutions may be effectively undercapitalized as a result of incomplete consolidation of minority ownership. Using two approaches – consolidating the minority-owned affiliates with the parent or deducting equity investments in minority...

This paper proposes a theoretically based and easy-to-implement way to measure the systemic risk of financial institutions using publicly available accounting and stock market data. The measure models the credit enhancement taxpayers provide to individual banks in the Merton tradition (1974) as...