We identify the determinants of all German banks’ sovereign debt exposures between 2005 and 2013 and test for the implications of these exposures for bank risk. Larger, more capital market affine, and less capitalised banks hold more sovereign bonds. Around 15% of all German banks never hold...

The World Financial Crisis has shaken the fundamentals of international banking and triggered a downward spiral of asset prices. To prevent a further meltdown of markets, governments have intervened massively through rescues measures aimed at recapitalizing banks and through liquidity support....

One key focus of the on-going debate on the integration of international financial markets have been measures to lengthen the maturity of foreign debt. Short-term debt is typically considered to be volatile and thus a potential trigger of currency crises. In contrast to the vivid policy debate...

Information costs and regulatory barriers are the main distinguishing features of international financial markets as compared to national financial markets. This paper presents a simple model of the impact of these factors on banks' cross-border activities and provides empirical evidence. Our...

If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should - ceteris paribus - become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...

This paper discusses whether the integration of international financial markets affects business cycle fluctuations. In the framework of a new open economy macro-model, we show that the link between financial openness and business cycle volatility depends on the nature of the underlying shock....

The globalization of international financial markets has renewed interest in the measurement of capital mobility. Consumption-based tests such as the Euler equation test are commonly used. These tests, however, are derived under restrictive assumptions on consumer behavior. In this paper, we ask...