We use a unique data set that comprises each bank's bids in the Eurosystem's main refinancing operations and its recourse to the LOLR facility (a) to derive banks' willingness-to-pay for liquidity through a one-week repo and (b) to show that a bank's willingness-to-pay is a good indicator for...

We adapt a theoretical model from the goods trade literature to test whether banks with a comparative cost advantage are more likely to enter foreign markets by means of foreign direct investment. We combine detailed proprietary bank-level data on the international activities of all German banks...

The recent banking crisis has revealed the existence of strong resiliency factors in the retail banking business model. On average, retail banks suffered less than other financial institutions from unexpected market changes. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure retail banks' business...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The obtained time series are...

In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives for banks, depositors, and regulators in connection with bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based...

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...

In this paper, we report a descriptive investigation of the structural evolution of two of the most important over-the-counter markets for liquidity in Germany: the interbank market for credit and for derivatives. We use end-of-quarter data from the German large credit register between 2002 and...

Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...