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...

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...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of loan growth and business model on bank risk in 15 EU countries. In contrast to the literature, we include a large number of unlisted banks in our sample which represent the majority of banks in the EU. We show that banks with high rates of loan growth are...

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...

In this paper, we use detailed data on the sovereign debt holdings of all German banks to analyse the determinants of sovereign debt exposures and the implications of sovereign exposures for bank risk. Our main findings are as follows. First, sovereign bond holdings are heterogeneous across...

This study investigates the bank competition-stability nexus using a unique regulatory dataset provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank over the period 1994 to 2010. First, we use outright bank defaults as the most direct measure of bank risk available and contrast the results to weaker forms of bank...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

In attempting to promote bank stability, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) provides a framework that seeks to control the amount of tail risk that large banks take in their trading books. However, banks around the world suffered sizeable trading losses during the recent crisis....

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 propose an algorithm to model contagion in the interbank market via what we term the credit quality channel. In existing models on contagion via interbank credit, external shocks to banks often spread to other banks only in case of a default. In contrast, shocks are transmitted via asset...