Several papers find a positive association between a bank's equity stake in a borrowing firm and lending to that firm. While such a positive cross-sectional correlation may be due to equity stakes benefiting lending, it may also be driven by endogeneity. To distinguish the two, we study a German...

Using data from a quantitative survey of German banks at three points in time (2015, 2017 and 2019), we analyze the impact of changes in the interest rate level on banks' net interest income and the countermeasures they take. A decline in the interest rate level has a more negative impact on net...

We analyze the dramatic decline of the employment share of unskilled labor in the West German economy, in particular its relation to the relatively rigid earnings structure. We find that the substitution elasticity between unskilled and skilled labor is rather low in most sectors of the economy....

In the paper we analyze the convergence process of the West German Laender from 1970 to 1995 using descriptive tools as well as panel estimation methods. Although there have been some winners in this process, the main finding is that convergence was insufficient in the sense that no gains have...

We study a conflict of interest faced by universal banks that conduct proprietary trading alongside their retail banking services. Our dataset contains the stock holdings of each and every German bank and of their corresponding retail clients. We investigate (i) whether banks deliberately push...

We use a unique security-level data set to analyze correlations in bond trading of banks, their respective retail customers and their affiliated mutual funds. Matching banks' proprietary holdings with the holdings of their funds and their retail customers for the period 2009-2016 at the security...

The recent banking crisis has revealed the existence of strong resiliency factors in the retail banking business model. On average, retail banks suffered less than other financial institutions from unexpected market changes. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure retail banks’...