Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

We develop a methodology to identify and rank systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). Our approach is consistent with that followed by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) but, unlike the latter, it is free of judgment and it is based entirely on publicly available data, thus...

The CFS survey covers individual situations of banks and other companies of the financial sector during the financial crisis. This provides a rare possibility to analyze appraisals, expectations and forecast errors of the core sector of the recent turmoil. Following standard ways of aggregating...

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,...

During the last years the lending business has come under considerable competitive pressure and bank managers often express concern regarding its profitability vis-a-vis other activities. This paper tries to empirically identify factors that are able to explain the financial performance of bank...

Die Vorstellung selbst-stabilisierender, zum Gleichgewicht tendierender Finanzmärkte, lange Zeit als Selbstverständlichkeit angesehen, ist durch die aktuelle Banken- und Kreditkrise in Frage gestellt. Trotz ausgefeilten Risikomanagements der Banken und einer an Basel II orientierten Aufsicht...

We propose the realized systemic risk beta as a measure for financial companies' contribution to systemic risk given network interdependence between firms' tail risk exposures. Conditional on statistically pre-identified network spillover effects and market as well as balance sheet information,...