We study a conflict of interest faced by universal banks that conduct proprietary trading alongside their retail banking services. Our dataset contains the stock holdings of each and every German bank and of their corresponding retail clients. We investigate (i) whether banks deliberately push...

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...

The extensive public support measures for the financial sector have been key for the management of the current financial crisis. This paper gives a detailed description of the measures taken by central banks and governments and attempts a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of such...

This study examines the promise of reducing expected resolution costs of financial institutions through either voluntary or mandated addition of contingently convertible debt securities to their long-term financing mix. I model the stochastic process by which an initially very well capitalized...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...

Information economics has emerged as the primary theoretical lens for framing financing decisions in firm R&D investment. Successful outcomes of R&D projects are either ex-ante impossible to predict or the information is asymmetrically distributed between inventors and investors. As a result,...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...

German banks experienced a merger wave throughout the 1990s. However, the success of bank mergers remains a continuous matter of debate. In this paper we suggest a taxonomy as how to evaluate post-merger performance on the basis of cost efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that...