Germany’s capital market relies on bank-intermediated products and not so much on capital market processes. Two of the pillars in Germany’s three-pillar banking system, the savings banks and the cooperative banks, have special statutes and are not exposed to the control of the capital market...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with...

The present paper uses a comparison of Japan and the US to argue that the debate about corporate governance reform is best framed in terms of systems of complementary instruments and institutions. It argues that the Japanese and US systems of corporate governance differ along many dimensions,...

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firmÂ’s risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated...

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy—as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

This paper provides a rationale for the coexistence of different systems of corporate governance based on the multitude of agency problems typically to be governed within a given firm. Because there are complementarity and substitution relationships between governance instruments, specific...

Using a large panel of UK manufacturing firms over the period 2000—2009, we consider how firms responded during the most recent financial crisis, estimating models for export market participation decisions and firm growth and survival. The results indicate that financial variables are highly...

In this paper, we analyze the network properties of the Italian e-MID data based on overnight loans during the period 1999-2010. We show that the networks appear to be random at the daily level, but contain significant non-random structure for longer aggregation periods. In this sense, the daily...

This paper investigates the impact of a changing market environment on the pricing of CDS spreads written on debt from EURO STOXX 50 firms. A Panel Smooth Transition Regression reveals that parameter estimates of standard CDS fundamentals are time-varying depending on current values of a set of...

The Eurosystem has been pursuing a crisis management policy for more than four years now. This policy aims primarily at maintaining financial stability in the euro area by providing vast liquidity support to commercial banks that are operating in nationally segmented banking systems. As a side...