Against the backdrop of a high stock of non-performing loans (NPLs) in several European countries, this paper investigates the role of NPLs for lending rates charged for newly granted loans in the euro area. More precisely, it looks for an effect that extends beyond losses caused by that stock...

This paper provides evidence for regulatory arbitrage within the class of assetbacked securities (ABS) based on individual asset holding data of German banks. I find that those banks operating with tight regulatory constraints pick the securities with the highest yield and lowest collateral...

We investigate the replenishment of 102 asset-backed securities (ABS) backed by more than 1.7 million small- and medium-sized enterprise loans. Based on our extensive data set from 2012 to 2017 obtained from the first and only central loan-level repository for ABS in Europe, we reveal that loans...

We investigate how differential exposures by German banks to the US real estate market during the recent financial crisis affect their corporate lending in Germany. Using unique bank-level exposure data, we distinguish between three different types of bank exposures, i.e. direct exposure to the...

Bank distress can have severe negative consequences for the stability of the financial system, the real economy, and for public finances. Regimes for the restructuring and resolution of banks, financed by bank levies and fiscal backstops, seek to reduce these costs. Bank levies attempt to...

The Eurosystem’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) increased the scarcity of safe assets, which caused significant declines and substantial dispersion in European repo rates. However, banks holding these safe assets benefited from this development: First, using the German security...

This paper studies how banks’ balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks’ credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank’s policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

This paper uses matched bank-firm-level data and the 2014 depreciation of the euro to show that exchange rate depreciations lead to increased bank loan supply of large banks with significant net foreign asset exposure. This increase in lending can be explained by a shift in credit towards both...

Does hedging motivate CDS trading and does that affect the availability of credit? To answer these questions we couple comprehensive bank-firm level CDS trading data from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation with the German credit register containing bilateral bank-firm credit...

This paper examines the relationship between central bank funding and credit risk-taking. Employing comprehensive bank-firm-level data from the German credit registry during 2009:Q1-2014:Q4, we find that borrowing from the central bank is associated with rebalancing of bank portfolios towards...