Bank lending policy, credit scoring and value-at-risk

Credit Risk Transfer and Bank Lending

We study the difference between loan sales and credit default swaps. A bank lends money to an entrepreneur to undertake a positive NPV project. After the loan has been made, the bank finds out if the project benefits from monitoring and if it should sell the loan to release regulatory capital. A bank can lay off credit risk by either selling the loan or by buying credit insurance through a cred...

Bank Lending and Credit Supply Shocks

This paper analyzes the linkages between credit supply conditions and bank lending. Building on the recent work of Gilchrist and Zakraǰsek [2011], we use the excess bond premium—a component of corporate credit spreads designed to measure shifts in the risk attitudes of financial intermediaries—to empirically identify credit supply shocks. Our results indicate that shocks to the excess bond prem...

Bank Lending and Monetary Policy: A Comment

Optimal versus realized bank credit risk and monetary policy

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods w...

Credit Risk Contributions to Value-at-Risk

This paper presents analytical solutions to the problem of how to calculate sensible VaR (Value-at-Risk) and ES (Expected Shortfall) contributions in the CreditRisk+ methodology. Via the ES contributions, ES itself can be exactly computed in finitely many steps. The methods are illustrated by numerical examples.