Examining 2012 Bank Risk Disclosures: Making a Case for Risk Standards

Jul 9, 2013

It has been common practice for over a decade for banks to make public risk disclosures. The detail provided in these disclosures varies across banks, which makes comparison difficult. In this paper, we propose a set of standards in order to analyze these disclosures. In particular, we compare a sample of bank risk disclosures with our set of standards, identifying banks whose risk appears to have moved by enough to suggest a degree of active management.