Over the past two decades, Germany experienced several periods of banking system instability rather than full-blown banking system crises. In this paper we introduce a continuous and forward-looking stability indicator for the banking system based on information on all financial institutions in...

This study investigates the development of income-decreasing discretionary expenses surrounding CEO turnovers at banks. We expect incoming CEOs to take an earnings bath during the initial stage of their tenure. For a sample of German banks over the period 1993-2012, we document that (1) incoming...

Transition from socialist to market economy brought drastic changes on the Hungarian labour market. Employment fell by 1.6m, i.e., by more than 25% during the past decade, while unemployment jumped from practically nil to over 14% within four years. This paper describes the changes in corporate...

One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. It is widely believed that competition has a positive effect on efficiency, but the theoretical and empirical support is quite scarce. The objective of this paper...

Labour market and financial information is combined to explore the effect of the quality of labour employed on the profitability of the firm. The quality of labour is measured as the portion of wage differentials that cannot be explained by the human capital model. Profitability of Hungarian...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...