Current regulatory changes in the financial services industry aim at ensuring customer protection in the context of investment advisory services. This study demonstrates that customer orientation as proposed by MiFID could improve the service profit chain of financial service providers. We draw...

Many private investors trust in the investment recommendations of professional financial advisors. This study investigates the influence of financial advice on the suitability of asset allocation based on the risk preferences of individual investors. We draw on a unique dataset from a large...

Does BPO pay off at the firm-level? Although there are several studies which analyze the potential benefits of BPO, there is a virtual absence of research papers on BPO outcomes. Based on an analysis of 137 Business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures at 254 German banks in a period between 1994...

This paper empirically investigates a novel approach for financial advisors to enhance customer satisfaction by segmenting customers based on their financial sophistication. We surveyed 761 customers of two German retail banks on their satisfaction with their latest purchase of an investment...

We show that place of residence affects where investors trade stocks. We analyze transaction, account, and demographic data from some 19,000 retail customers of a German online brokerage house and find that investors prefer nearby stock exchanges. This local exchange bias can hardly be explained...

Empirical studies report a gap between theoretical concepts of management accounting and the actual practice in organizations. Specifically, there is a virtual absence of literature on the individual factors that drive or hinder the adoption of sophisticated management accounting concepts. In...

Over the last four years, more than 50,000 German bank employees lost their jobs and aggregate debt write-downs in the German banking market added up to 100 billion euros. Yet, these four problem-stricken years witnessed one of the biggest success stories in German banking, namely the rise of...

We show that multi-bank loan pools improve the risk-return profile of regional banks' loan business. Banks write simple contracts on the proceeds from pooled loan portfolios, taking into account the agency problems in joint loan production. Thereby, banks benefit from diversifying credit risk...

We use panel data from nine countries over the period 1996 to 2003 to test how revenue diversification in conjunction with increasing bank size affects bank value. Using a comprehensive framework for bank performance measurement, we find no evidence for a conglomerate discount, unlike studies...

A widely recognized paper by Colin Mayer (1988) has led to a profound revision of academic thinking about financing patterns of corporations in different countries. Using flow-of-funds data instead of balance sheet data, Mayer and others who followed his lead found that internal financing is the...