Open-end real estate funds are of particular importance in the German bank-dominated financial system. However, recently the German open-end fund industry came under severe distress which triggered a broad discussion of required regulatory interventions. This paper gives a detailed description...

Small and medium-sized firms often obtain capital via a mixture of relationship and arm's-length bank lending. This paper explores the reasons for the dominance of such heterogeneous multiple bank financing. We show that the incidence of inefficient credit termination decreases in the...

This paper provides new insights into the nature of loan securitization. We analyze the use of collateralized loan obligation (CLO) transactions by European banks from 1997 to 2004 and try to identify the influence that various firm-specific and macroeconomic factors may have on an institution's...

In this paper, we propose a model of credit rating agencies using the global games framework to incorporate information and coordination problems. We introduce a refined utility function of a credit rating agency that, additional to reputation maximization, also embeds aspects of competition and...