Refine
Year of publication
- 1998 (2)
Document Type
- Working Paper (2)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Derivat, Wertpapier (1)
- Klein- und Mittelbetrieb (1)
- Kredit (1)
- Kreditmanagement (1)
- Universalbank (1)
- banking (1)
- credit derivatives (1)
- credit risk management (1)
- distress (1)
- relationship lending (1)
Institute
We studied information and interaction processes in six lending relationships between a universal bank and medium sized firms. The study is based on the credit files of the respective firms. If no problems occur in these lending relationships, bank monitoring is based mainly on cheap, retrospective and internal data. In case of distress, more expensive, prospective and external information is used. The level of monitoring and the willingness to renegotiate the lending relationship depends on what the lending officers can learn about the future prospects of the firm from the behaviour of the debtors. We identify both signalling and bonding activities. Such learning from past behaviour seems to allow monitoring at low cost, whereas the direct observation of the firm's investment outlook seems to be very costly. Also, too much knowledge about the firm's investments might leave the bank in a very strong bargaining position and distort investment incentives. Therefore, the traditional view of credit assessment as observation of the quality of a borrower's investment programme needs to be reconsidered.
Banks increasingly recognize the need to measure and manage the credit risk of their loans on a portfolio basis. We address the subportfolio "middle market". Due to their specific lending policy for this market segment it is an important task for banks to systematically identify regional and industrial credit concentrations and reduce the detected concentrations through diversification. In recent years, the development of markets for credit securitization and credit derivatives has provided new credit risk management tools. However, in the addressed market segment adverse selection and moral hazard problems are quite severe. A potential successful application of credit securitization and credit derivatives for managing credit risk of middle market commercial loan portfolios depends on the development of incentive-compatible structures which solve or at least mitigate the adverse selection and moral hazard problems. In this paper we identify a number of general requirements and describe two possible solution concepts.
