To test if safety nets create moral hazard in the banking industry, we develop a simultaneous structural two-equations model that specifies the probability of a bailout and banks' risk taking.We identify the effect of expected bailout probabilities on risk taking using exclusion restrictions...

We identify investor moral hazard in the German fiscal federation. Our identification strategy is based on a variable, which was used by the German Federal Constitutional Court as an indicator to determine eligibility of two German states (Länder) to a bail-out, the interest payments-to-revenue...

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that...

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns,...

A low interest rate environment can pose a key risk to the life insurance sector. A deteriorating return on investment holdings jeopardizes the guaranteed return on life insurance contracts. In this paper, we examine the effect of low interest rates on German life insurers by applying various...

Critics claim that capital requirements can exacerbate credit cycles by restricting lending in an economic downturn. The introduction of Basel 2, in particular, has led to concerns that risksensitive capital charges are highly correlated with the business cycle. The Basel Committee is...

This study analyzes the impact of bank relationships on a firm's cost of debt. We focus on relationships with the main bank. We find that a firm's cost of debt decreases with relationship strength, proxied by the share of bank debt provided by the main lender, but rises with relationship length....

We use portfolios of passive investment strategies to replicate the interest risk of banks' banking books. The following empirical statements are derived: (i) Changes in banks' present value and in their net interest income are highly correlated, irrespective of the banks' portfolio composition....

This paper investigates contagion at the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is u-shaped. Under...

We put forward a Merton-type multi-factor portfolio model for assessing banks' contributions to systemic risk. This model accounts for the major drivers of banks' systemic relevance: size, default risk and correlation of banks' assets as a proxy for interconnectedness. We measure systemic risk...