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...

Ongoing financial innovation and greater information availability increase the tradability of bank assets and reduce banks' dependence on individual bank managers as private information in the lending process declines. In this paper we argue that this has two effects on banks, with opposing...

This paper compares four forms of inter-regional financial risk sharing: (i) segmentation, (ii) integration trough the secured interbank market, (iii) integration trough the unsecured interbank market, (iv) integration of retail markets. The secured interbank market is an optimal risk-sharing...

Open-end real estate funds are of particular importance in the German bank- dominated financial system. However, recently the German open-end fund industry came under severe distress which triggered a broad discussion of required regulatory interventions. This paper gives a detailed description...

Money markets have two functions, the allocation of liquidity and the processing of information. We develop a model that allows us to evaluate the efficiency of different money market derivatives regarding these two objectives. We assume that due to its size, a large bank receives a more precise...

Heterogenous banking supervision and regulation is often considered as the most important impediment for Pan-European Bank mergers. In this paper we identify other more fundamental reasons for a limited degree of cross-country integration in retail banking. We argue that the distribution of...

This paper analyzes the individual bidding behaviour of German banks in the money market auctions conducted by the ECB from the beginning of the third quarter of 2000 to the end of the first quarter of 2001. Our approach takes a variety of characteristics of the individual banks into account. In...