Using a large panel data set it is investigated whether works councils act as a sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency

Theory of financial intermediation gives contradicting answers to the question whether banks should diversify or focus their loan portfolios. Our aim is to find out which of the two strategies is predominant in the German banking market. To this end we measure diversification for all German...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...

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...

In this paper we focus on the analysis of the effect of prediction and estimation risk on the loss distribution, risk measures and economic capital. When variables for the determination of probability of default and loss distribution have to be predicted because they are not available at the...

This paper presents an estimated DSGE model for the European Monetary Union. Our approach, contrary to the previous studies, accounts for heterogeneity within the euro area. We advance the empirical literature by estimating an open-economy model with unfiltered data, which is a much more...

We establish some stylised facts for Germany’s business cycle at the level of the firm. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank’s balance sheet statistic covering, on average, 55,000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we analyse the reallocation across individual producers...

This paper discusses the forecasting performance of alternative factor models based on a large panel of quarterly time series for the german economy. One model extracts factors by static principals components analysis, the other is based on dynamic principal components obtained using frequency...