This paper describes the first thorough analysis of the interest risk of German banks on an individual bank level. We develop a new method that is based on time series of accountingbased data to quantify the interest risk of banks and apply it to analyze the German banking system. We find...

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...

From a banking supervisory perspective, this paper analyses aspects of market risk of an aggregated trading portfolio comprised of the trading books of 11 German banks with a regulatory approved internal market risk model. Based on real, clean profit and loss data and Value-at-Risk estimates of...

Developments in risk-transfer instruments and risk management techniques in the last two decades have fundamentally changed how banks manage their assets and liabilities. In this document we show that, for all three sectors of German universal banks (private commercial banks, savings banks, and...

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...

We analyze the dynamics of banks’ regulatory capital ratios. Using monthly data of regulatory capital ratios for a subset of large German banks, we estimate the target level and the adjustment speed of the capital ratio for each bank separately. We find evidence that, first, there exists a...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...

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...

Relationship lending is a common practice in credit financing all over the world, particularly in Germany. On the basis of a comprehensive data set comprising information on firm-bank relationships for more than 16,000 observations, this study analyses the determinants of relationship lending in...

We use a unique dataset of German banks’ exposure to interest rate risk to derive the following statements about their exposure to this risk and their earnings from term transformation. The systematic factor for the exposure to interest rate risk moves in sync with the shape of the term...