Since 2008, the German open-ended real estate fund (GOEREF) industry has experienced a critical phase of suspensions of redemption of fund shares, announced fund terminations and, eventually, introduction of a new regulation. With assets under management of over EUR 80 billion, GOEREFs are the...

The World Financial Crisis has shaken the fundamentals of international banking and triggered a downward spiral of asset prices. To prevent a further meltdown of markets, governments have intervened massively through rescues measures aimed at recapitalizing banks and through liquidity support....

We analyze the effect of geographic proximity on individual investors’ portfolio choice. Using a unique data set which covers the common stockholdings of private households at regional banks in Germany, we document strong and consistent overinvestment in geographically close companies. Our...

We analyze securities trading by banks during the crisis and the associated spillovers to the supply of credit. We use a proprietary dataset that has the investments of banks at the security level for 2005-2012 in conjunction with the credit register from Germany. We find that - during the...

This paper provides evidence for regulatory arbitrage within the class of asset-backed securities (ABS) based on individual asset holding data of German banks. I find that banks operating with tight regulatory constraints exploit the low risk-sensitivity of rating-contingent capital requirements...

This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the...

In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...