We adapt a theoretical model from the goods trade literature to test whether banks with a comparative cost advantage are more likely to enter foreign markets by means of foreign direct investment. We combine detailed proprietary bank-level data on the international activities of all German banks...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors’ local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

This study applies a novel way of measuring, quantifying and modelling the systemic risk within the financial system. The magnitude of risk spill over effects is gauged by introducing a specific weighting scheme. This approach originally stems from spatial econometrics. The methodology allows...