Every year 400,000 entrepreneurs fail and 60,000 file for personal bankruptcy. The option to declare bankruptcy provides entrepreneurs with insurance against the financial consequences of business failures. However, it comes at the cost of worsened credit market conditions. In this paper, we...

In this paper we ‘update’ the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second,...

Using a unique data set on German banks' loans to the German real economy, we investigate banks' credit risk. This data set includes the volume of loans per bank and industry as well as the corresponding write-downs. Our empirical study for the period 2003-2011 yields the following results: (i)...

The massive decline in international trade in 2008/09 is often attributed to the global deterioration in financial conditions after the bankruptcy of a US investment bank, Lehman Brothers. This paper examines the association between external finance and firm activity in Germany in more detail....

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 investigate how the lending activities of a multinational bank’s affiliates located abroad are affected by funding difficulties in view of the financial crisis. For this, we consider transaction-induced changes in long-term lending to the private sector of 40 countries by the affiliates of...

This paper provides new evidence that taxes affect capital structure choice, using a unique and comprehensive panel data set which covers 86,173 German non-financial firms over the years 1973–2008. Following the Graham methodology to simulate marginal tax rates, we find a statistically and...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, the discussion on the nature of runs and on the stabilizing role of liquidity holdings has intensified. This paper explores the cash management conducted by German open-end equity funds for the period between 2005 and 2010. Since ownership structures...

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...

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...