This paper investigates the consequences of Basel II for international capital flows to emerging markets. The paper shows that the magnitude of effects critically depends on a number of assumptions, including: the mapping of risk weights to ratings, assumptions about required return on capital,...

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on financial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of financial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of financial development. In order to measure the quality of...

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...

This paper analyzes the effect of the business cycle on the regulatory capital buffer of German local banks in the period 1993-2004. The capital buffer is found to fluctuate countercyclically over the business cycle. The fluctuation is stronger for public banks than for cooperative banks....

This paper investigates whether the new Basel Accord will induce a change in bank lending to emerging markets using a comprehensive new data set on German banks' foreign exposure. We test two interlinked hypotheses on the conditions under which the change in the regulatory capital would...

This paper investigates the consequences of Basel II for international capital flows to emerging markets. The paper shows that the magnitude of effects critically depends on a number of assumptions, including: the mapping of risk weights to ratings, assumptions about required return on capital,...

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...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS market caused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline in the CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect which arises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...