Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy...

Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy...

This paper is a draft for the chapter German banks and banking structure of the forthcoming book The German financial system edited by J.P. Krahnen and R.H. Schmidt (Oxford University Press). As such, the paper starts out with a description of past and present structural features of the German...

We analyze the differential impact of domestic and foreign monetary policy on the local supply of bank credit in domestic and foreign currencies. We analyze a novel, supervisory dataset from Hungary that records all bank lending to firms including its currency denomination. Accounting for...

When liquidity plays an important role as in times of financial crisis, asset prices in some markets may reflect the amount of liquidity available in the market rather than the future earning power of the asset. Mark-to-market accounting is not a desirable way to assess the solvency of a...

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gradual evolution of the supervisory policy adopted by the Basle Committee for the regulatory treatment of asset securitisation. We carefully highlight the pathology of the new securitisation framework to facilitate a general understanding of...

In Germany a public discussion on the power of banks has been going on for decades now with the term power having at least two meanings. On the one hand, it denotes the power of banks to control public corporations through direct shareholdings or the exercise of proxy votes this is the power of...

In recent years new methods and models have been developed to quantify credit risk on a portfolio basis. CreditMetrics (tm), CreditRisk+, CreditPortfolio (tm) are among the best known and many others are similar to them. At first glance they are quite different in their approaches and...

This paper analyzes banks choice between lending to firms individually and sharing lending with other banks, when firms and banks are subject to moral hazard and monitoring is essential. Multiple-bank lending is optimal whenever the benefit of greater diversification in terms of higher...