With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

Political risk represents an important hidden transaction cost that reduces international trade. This paper investigates the claim that German public export credit guarantees (Hermes guarantees) mitigate this friction to trade flows and hence promote exports. We employ an empirical trade gravity...

This paper analyzes the effect of the business cycle on the regulatory capital buffer of German savings and cooperative banks in the period 19932003. The capital buffer is found to fluctuate anticyclically over the business cycle. The fluctuation is stronger for savings banks than for...