Our paper addresses firm size as a driver of systematic credit risk in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Key contributions are the use of a unique data set of SME lending by over 400 German banks and relating systematic risk to the size dependence of regulatory capital requirements....

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...

We analyze the dispersion of month-end price marks simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after initiations of TRACE and introductions of issuers into Markit’s CDS database. Disseminated bonds show large and statistically significant...

The subprime crisis revealed that the adoption of suitable systems for the management of credit risk is of utmost concern. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2009) advises banks to use credit portfolio models with caution when assessing the capital adequacy. This paper investigates...

Using a unique data set that contains the complete ownership structure of the German stock market, we study the momentum and contrarian trading of different investor groups. Foreign investors and financial institutions, and especially mutual funds, are momentum traders, whereas private...

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...

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...