Value at Risk (VaR) is an important issue for banks since its adoption as a primary risk metric in the Basel Accords and the requirement that it is calculated on a daily basis. VaR calculates maximum expected losses over a given time period at a given tolerance level. Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) measures extreme risk. It calculates the risk beyond VaR. Relative industry risk measurement is...

Bank privatization and tighter credit enforcement are believed indispensable to facilitate the Eastern European transition process. We analyze lending by value-maximizing banks, the only source of capital in the transition, faced by non-performing loans to the state-owned sector. We show that banks have a perverse incentive to fund former debtors, although less efficient and more risky, because...

In the past decade banks invested heavily in internet technology so as to engage in e-business and ecommerce activities. However, this development exposed banks to threats, such as online fraud. Consequently, there was a need to adopt security measures and controls to mitigate such threats. Banks in developed countries have developed a level of ‘best practice’ to reduce such online threats. The...

Current empirical literature on the activities of foreign banks exhibit some degree of consensus around the thesis that foreign banks are less efficient than domestic banks in the case of industrial countries, but they are more efficient than domestic institutions in emerging economies. The reasons for such phenomenon include the exposure to tougher competition in industrial countries, adoption...

Banks routinely invest in the venture capital market. Why are they interested in venture capital, and how do their investments differ from independent venture capitalists? The banking literature suggests that banks may have some valuable expertise that they might want to leverage into venture capital. Alternatively, banks may want to build relationships in the venture market for their core lend...

This paper studies bank regulation in the presence of deposit insurance, where banks have private information on their own ability and their investment strategy. Banks choose the mean and variance of their portfolio return. Regulators wish to control banks’ risk choice, even though all agents are risk neutral and there are no deadweight costs of bank failure, because high risk adversely affects...

In September 2008, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed into conservatorship and dividend payments on common and preferred shares were suspended. As a result, share prices fell to nearly zero and many banks across the country lost the value of their investments in the preferred shares. We estimate more than 600 depository institutions in the United ...

There has been a lot of restructuring and reshaping of the role of the banks in the past decade as India too has groomed itself for a more visible presence on the global platform. Stiff competition between the public sector banks and foreign players has led to public sector banks gaining a dominant while the foreign banks have had to adjust to the domestic banking scene to a great extent. In to...

We develop a lending game in which relationship-specific investments by firms benefit banks and vice versa. We show that even if all firms and banks prefer high-tech relationship loans under the first-best, asymmetric information and investment non-contractibility make them choose low-tech transaction loans. However, governments with intermediate risk ratings can use Groves subsidies for a conc...

The presence of other firms in a foreign market can have a double-edged effect on the profitability of new entrants. Firstly, a larger presence of other firms implies more competition and thus lowers the earnings prospects of new entrants. Secondly, there might be positive spill-over effects between the activities of new and old entrants, which can lead to clustering effects. Such clustering of...