Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...

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...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients’ security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies, with a focus on down-side risk metrics, as a portfolio diversification strategy in a European market context. We apply these measures to a set of daily arithmetically-compounded returns, in...

How can investors unlock the returns on the electric vehicle industry? Available investment choices range from individual stocks to exchange traded funds. We select six representative assets and characterize the time-varying joint distribution of their returns by copula-GARCH models. They...

This paper examines the international credit portfolios of German banks. We construct a bank-country panel from a unique dataset for a representative set of countries and ask why banks leave diversification opportunities unexploited in some countries. Controlling for bank heterogeneity, we...

The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favour of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare...

We provide an accurate closed-form expression for the expected shortfall of linear portfolios with elliptically distributed risk factors. Our results aim to correct inaccuracies that originate in Kamdem (2005) and are present also in at least thirty other papers referencing it, including the...

Bitcoin is an exciting new financial product that may be useful for inclusion in investment portfolios. This paper investigates the implications of replacing gold in an investment portfolio with bitcoin (“digital gold”). Our approach is to use several different multivariate GARCH models...

Regulatory capital for trading book positions includes two components that cover different risks but apply to the same portfolio, one for market risk and one for credit risk. Similar approaches are common in banks’ internal models for economic capital. Although it is known that joint market...