In this paper, we use detailed data on the sovereign debt holdings of all German banks to analyse the determinants of sovereign debt exposures and the implications of sovereign exposures for bank risk. Our main findings are as follows. First, sovereign bond holdings are heterogeneous across...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

Instruments for credit risk transfer arise endogenously from and interact with optimizing behavior of their users. This is particularly true with credit derivatives which are usually OTC contracts between banks as buyers and sellers of credit risk. Recent literature, however, does not account...

Using monthly data for the period 1953-2003, we apply a real-time modeling approach to investigate the implications of U.S. political stock market anomalies for forecasting excess stock returns. Our empirical findings show that political variables, selected on the basis of widely used model...

We analyze the effect of geographic proximity on individual investors' portfolio choice. Using a unique data set which covers the common stockholdings of private households at regional banks in Germany, we document strong and consistent overinvestment in geographically close companies. Our...

We use a unique and comprehensive data set on open-end real estate funds in Germany to study a liquidity crisis that hit this industry between 2005 and 2006. Since this industry is comparably unregulated our data set permits us to contrast competing explanations of liquidity crisis. We find that...

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...

This study applies a novel way of measuring, quantifying and modelling the systemic risk within the financial system. The magnitude of risk spill over effects is gauged by introducing a specific weighting scheme. This approach originally stems from spatial econometrics. The methodology allows...

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for...

This paper describes the first thorough analysis of the interest risk of German banks on an individual bank level. We develop a new method that is based on time series of accountingbased data to quantify the interest risk of banks and apply it to analyze the German banking system. We find...