It has long been recognised that banking is a procyclical business. That is, banks tend to contract their lending activity when there are business downturns because of their concern about loan quality and repayment probability. This exacerbates the economic downturn as credit constrained businesses and individuals cut back on their real investment activity. In contrast, banks expand their lendi...

In fact, looking only at the level of an individual bank's balance sheet, the analysis and evaluation of risk exposures have become considerably more complex. First, technology and modeling advances have added complex products to banks' traditional exposures thereby complicating risk evaluation. Second, the evolution of banking activities and business strategies has meant that the credit risk o...

To gauge governments’ contingent liabilities behind banking systems, we employ: Sovereign ratings (SOVBD); bank’s financial strength ratings (assessing solidity without external support; BFSR); bank’s overall credit ratings (government support reduces default probabilities; BDCR). We find: 1) BDCR and SOVBD are positively correlated, much more in developing countries, where sovereign guarantees...

Pension buy-ins and buy-outs have become an important aspect of managing pension risk in recent years. As a step toward understanding these pension de-risking instruments, we develop models for pricing investment risk and longevity risk embedded in pension buy-ins and buy-outs. We also bring a contingent-claims framework to price credit risk of buy-in bulk annuities. Overall, our model can be u...

The purpose of this note is to describe a risk management procedure applicable to options on large credit portfolios such as CDO tranches on iTraxx or CDX. Credit spread risks are dynamically hedged using single name defaultable claims while default risk is kept under control thanks to diversification. The proposed risk management approach mixes ideas from finance and insurance and departs from...

This paper presents computational techniques that make a certain class of fully dynamic intensity-based models for portfolio credit risk, along the lines of Duffie and Gârleanu (2001) and Mortensen (2006), just as computationally tractable as the Gaussian copula model. For this model, we improve the fit to tranche spreads by a factor of around three, by allowing for a more flexible correlation ...

We propose a unified structural credit risk model incorporating insolvency, recovery and rollover risks. The firm finances itself mainly by issuing shortand long-term debt. Short-term debt can have either a discrete or a more realistic staggered tenor structure. We show that a unique threshold strategy (i.e., a bank run barrier) exists for short-term creditors to decide when to withdraw their f...

This paper reviews the use and structure of commodity-linked credit instruments. It is argued that in the absence of contingent markets food firms face increasing financial risk reduced investment, and limited access to debt markets. One strategy is to issue commodity-linked credit whose payment structure is linked to the price of an underlying commodity. In some cases, a commodity-linked bond ...

Section 2227 of the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996 requires the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to conduct a study and submit a report every five years to Congress detailing the extent of small business lending by all creditors. The act specifies that the study should identify factors that provide policymakers with insight into the small business...