The aim of the paper is to give a better understanding of the risk return relationship of various investment products in Germany. The paper analyses the performance of open ended funds (both public and special) and listed real estate companies. For the purpose of this analyis a benchmark for...

In a global sense, the concept of sustainability plays nowadays an important role in governments, society and especially in the real estate sector, which is responsible for 40% of final energy consumption in the European Union. This reflects not only the enormous potential of buildings in...

In 2006 Special real estate funds in Germany represent more than EUR 19 billion assets in real estate. It is quite notably that the total return fell on average from 6.5% in 2001 to 2.8% in 2005. However, during the whole analysed period of 2001-2005 the income return remained at 5.4%, whereas...

Special real estate funds in Germany represent more than EUR 16 billion assets in real estate. Investors, investment companies and the public domain did not yet have any access to performance data of the special real estate funds. The paper intends to close this gap and provides a thorough...

The increase in cross border investments tends to synchronise the national markets. Based on the extensive database of DID and IPD it can be derived that the property markets within Europe reveal signs of convergence. This convergence is especially pronounced in the office market, where the...

The German property market has shown a remarkably stable performance over the last decades. Especially in the worldwide financial crisis 2008 and 2009 German valuation practise has been questioned by international and especially UK market participants. The paper investigates the performance of...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

Over the past decades, banks have significantly increased their cross-border asset positions. The ongoing crisis on international financial markets has raised the question whether this increase in cross-border activities has allowed banks to diversify risks and to what extent it has increased...

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can...