With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

Political risk represents an important hidden transaction cost that reduces international trade. This paper investigates the claim that German public export credit guarantees (Hermes guarantees) mitigate this friction to trade flows and hence promote exports. We employ an empirical trade gravity...

The aim of this paper is to assess how German savings banks adjust capital and risk under capital regulation. We estimate a modified version of the model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992). This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we test the capital buffer theory...

This paper analyzes the effect of the business cycle on the regulatory capital buffer of German savings and cooperative banks in the period 19932003. The capital buffer is found to fluctuate anticyclically over the business cycle. The fluctuation is stronger for savings banks than for...

Based on a quarterly regulatory dataset for German banks from 1999 to 2004, this paper analyzes the effects of banks’ regulatory capital on the transmission of monetary policy in a system of liquidity networks. The dynamic panel regression results provide evidence in favor of the bank capital...

This paper investigates the purchases and redemptions of a large cross-sectional sample of German equity funds. We find that investors punish bad performance by selling their shares, but also have a tendency to sell winners. Investors in large fund families show higher sales and redemption...