In the discussion about the structure and evolution of financial systems, the US separated and the German universal banking system are commonly considered as antipodes. This paper shows that the differences in the role of banks in these two economies are less pronounced than the conventional...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

A fall in house prices due to a change in its fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a closed...

The paper starts with a short survey on the main ideas of portfolio theory. Based on this, mean-variance efficient portfolios (stock as well as bond portfolios) for German investors of different degrees of risk aversion are constructed. It is shown that for them international diversification of...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

Bond as well as stock portfolios of German investors are compared to the respective mean-variance-efficient portfolios. It is found that independent of the investors' degree of risk aversion, German investors' portfolios deviate significantly from the mean-variance-efficient ones, especially the...

Since 2005, the EU ETS has provided a market-based price signal for European carbon emissions, accompanied by increasing economic research related to this policy instrument. In this paper, we carry out a review of the empirical literature examining allowance price formation. A consensus has...

The authors study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough. Upon introducing non-informed agents, the...

We explore how disclosure requirements that regulate the release of new information may affect the dynamics of financial markets. Our analysis is based on three agentbased financial market models that are able to produce realistic financial market dynamics. We discover that the average deviation...