Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

We use a unique dataset of German banks' exposure to interest rate risk to derive the following statements about their exposure to this risk and their earnings from term transformation. The systematic factor for the exposure to interest rate risk moves in sync with the shape of the term...

Carrying out interbank contagion simulations for the German banking sector for the period from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2011, we obtain the following results: (i) The system becomes less vulnerable to direct interbank contagion over time. (ii) The loss distribution for...

Using granular data of German banks for the 2003 to 2018 period, we analyse the determinants of bank rates on retail deposits. We find that a bank's rate on sight deposits is especially low if the bank operates in rural districts, if it is not exposed to strong competition and if it provides...

This paper investigates contagion at the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is u-shaped. Under...

The prevailing view in the literature is that, in the long run, an increase in the level of interest rates will impact positively on banks' net interest margins. Using a time series of more than 40 years for the German banking system, we confirm this effect (the net interest margin increases by...

This paper investigates determinants of banks' structural exposure to interest rate risk in their banking book. Using bank-level data for German banks, we find evidence that a bank's exposure to interest rate risk depends on its presumed optimization horizon. The longer the presumed optimization...

We investigate German banks' exposure to interest rate risk. In finance, higher demand for a risky asset is typically associated with higher expected return. However, employing a utility function which implies both risk‐averse and risk‐seeking behavior depending on the level of profits, we...

We investigate whether banks actively manage their exposure to interest rate risk in the short run. Using bank-level data of German banks for the period 2011Q4- 2017Q2, we find evidence that banks actively manage their interest rate risk exposure in their banking books: They take account of...

We use a unique dataset of German banks' exposure to interest rate risk to derive the following statements about their exposure to this risk and their earnings from term transformation. The systematic factor for the exposure to interest rate risk moves in sync with the shape of the term...