Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks' profitability (ROA) and their portfolio...

The German Commercial Code ("HGB") allows banks to build visible reserves for general banking risks according to section 340g HGB. These "GBR reserves" may, in addition to their risk provisioning function, be used to enhance capital endowment, for internal financing, signaling or earnings...

In the last few years it has been possible to observe decreasing interest margins for German universal banks. At the same time, institutions increasingly moved part of their business from interest to fee-earning activities. This study analyzes the determinants of non-interest income and its...

Efficiency is considered a key factor when evaluating a bank's performance. Moreover, efficiency enhancement is an explicit policy objective in the Single Market Directive of the European Commission. But efficiency improvements may come at the expense of deteriorating bank profits and excessive...

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor banks constantly. Thus, they usually obtain early warning signals that precede ultimate failure and, in fact, banks can be regarded as troubled to varying degrees before...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

Evidence on the interdependency between monetary policy and the state of the banking system is scarce. We suggest an integrated micro-macro approach with two core virtues. First, we measure the probability of bank distress directly at the bank level. Second, we integrate a microeconomic hazard...

Liquidity creation is one of banks’ raisons d’être. But what happens to liquidity creation and risk taking when a bank is identified as distressed by regulatory bodies and subjected to regulatory interventions and/or receives capital injections? What are the long-run effects of such...

Based on detailed regulatory intervention data among German banks during 1994-2008, we test if supervisory measures affect the likelihood and the timing of bank recovery. Severe regulatory measures increase both the likelihood of recovery and its duration while weak measures are insignificant....

Banking supervision requires regular inspection and assessment of financial institutions. In Germany this task is carried out by the central bank (“Deutsche Bundesbank, BBK”) in cooperation with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (“Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,...