Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

We investigate whether the willingness to take investment risk is a sex-linked trait and link the results to the country's gender equality regime. Our empirical analysis involves household data on financial asset holdings as well as on self-reported risk tolerance for Austria, Italy, the...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...

German banks experienced a merger wave throughout the 1990s. However, the success of bank mergers remains a continuous matter of debate. In this paper we suggest a taxonomy as how to evaluate post-merger performance on the basis of cost efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that...

We analyze the stability of efficiency rankings of German universal banks between 1993 and 2004. First, we estimate traditional efficiency scores with stochastic cost and alternative profit frontier analysis. Then, we explicitly allow for different risk preferences and measure efficiency with a...

We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index which covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and state-dependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...