If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should – ceteris paribus – become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

The German financial system is characterized by lower degrees of penetration by foreign commercial banks and of (bank) disintermedation than, for instance, that of the United States. These differences between the two countries could be attributed to the fact that universal banking in Germany...