This paper sheds light on the effect of quantitative easing (QE) on bank lending. Using data on German banks for 2014-2016, I show that QE encourages banks to rebalance from securities to loans. For identification, I use bond redemptions as exogenous variation in banks' need to rebalance their...

The beta dispersion, which is the spread of betas on a stock market, can be interpreted as a measure of market vulnerability. This study examines the economic idea of the beta dispersion and its application as a market return predictor. Based on the empirical beta dispersion observed in the US...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...

This paper deals with stress tests for credit risk and shows how exploiting the discretion when setting up and implementing a model can drive the results of a quantitative stress test for default probabilities. For this purpose, we employ several variations of a CreditPortfolioView-style model...

In this paper we study the impact of model uncertainty, which occurs when linking a stress scenario to default probabilities, on reduced-form credit risk stress testing. This type of uncertainty is omnipresent in most macroeconomic stress testing applications due to short time series for banks'...

Exploiting a granular dataset of banks' security holdings I assess the impact of unconventional monetary policy on bank lending and security holdings. Using a difference-in-differences regression setup and holding the security composition of each bank constant at its level in January 2014, well...

This paper investigates the purchases and redemptions of a large cross-sectional sample of German equity funds. We find that investors punish bad performance by selling their shares, but also have a tendency to sell winners. Investors in large fund families show higher sales and redemption...

This paper provides initial evidence on counterparty risk-mitigation activities of financial institutions on the basis of Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) proprietary bilateral credit default swap transactions and positions. We show that financial institutions that are active...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross- section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...