This paper analyses the role of bank-related constraints in explaining the sharp slowdown in bank lending to non-financial corporations in Germany during the recent financial crisis. We use a panel approach based on a unique data set which matches the individual responses of the banks...

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...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...

This paper introduces a multivariate pure-jump Lévy process which allows for skewness and excess kurtosis of single asset returns and for asymptotic tail dependence in the multivariate setting. It is termed Variance Compound Gamma (VCG). The novelty of my approach is that, by applying a...

We examine contagion from a number of financial systems to the German financial system using the information content of CDS prices in a GARCH model. After controlling for common factors which may cause comovement in security prices, we find evidence for contagion from the US and European...

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...

Carrying out interbank contagion simulations for the German banking sector for the period from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2011, we obtain the following results: (i) The system becomes less vulnerable to direct interbank contagion over time. (ii) The loss distribution for...

The pattern of financial linkages is important in many areas of banking and finance. Yet bilateral linkages are often unknown, and maximum entropy serves as the leading method for estimating unobserved counterparty exposures. This paper proposes an efficient alternative that combines...

In this paper we relate a bank's choice between retail and wholesale liabilities to real economic uncertainty and the resulting volatility of bank loan volumes. We argue that since the volume of retail deposits is slow and costly to adjust to shocks in the volume of bank assets, banks facing...

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...