German savers are renowned for preferring safe, long-term investments, thus providing patient capital, with bank deposits playing an important role. Using a comprehensive data set for the German banking sector, we examine whether German depositors are really that patient, abstaining from any...

Recent regulatory initiatives such as the European Deposit Insurance Scheme propose a change in the coverage and backing of deposit insurances. An assessment of these proposals requires a thorough understanding of what drives depositors' withdrawal decisions. We show that Google searches for...

This paper examines the investment behavior in debt securities across financial institutions with a particular focus on how they respond to price changes. For identification, we use security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Our results suggest that banks...

We study the response of bond spreads to a liquidity supply shock in the credit default swap (CDS) market. Our identification strategy exploits the exogenous exit of a large dealer from the single-name CDS market as well as granular data on CDS transactions and bond portfolio holdings of German...

Banks lend more to banks that are similar to them. Using data from the German credit register and proprietary supervisory data on the quality of banks’ loan portfolio, we show that a similar portfolio of the lending and borrowing bank helps to overcome information asymmetries in interbank...

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...

Investment funds are highly connected with each other, but also with the broader financial system. In this paper, we quantify potential vulnerabilities arising from funds' connectedness. While previous work exclusively focused on indirect connections (overlapping asset portfolios) between...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Is the asset management sector a source of financial instability? This paper contributes to the debate by performing a macroprudential stress test in order to quantify systemic risks in the mutual fund sector. For this purpose we include the welldocumented flow-performance relationship as an...

Using a unique dataset on the sectoral ownership structure of euro area equity mutual funds, we study how different investor groups contribute to the negative performance externality from large outflows. Investment funds, as holders of mutual funds, are the main contributors to the flow...