Banks play a role in the corporate governance of firms as well as acting as debtfinanciers around the world. Universal banks can have control over borrowing firmsby representation on the board of directors or by holding shares through direct stakesor institutional holdings. We investigate the...

It is well known that asset allocation policy is the major determinant of fundperformance. However, there is substantial disagreement about the exactmagnitude of the contribution of asset allocation. Following the approach inIbbotson and Kaplan (2000), we use German and Swiss balanced mutualfund...

This paper presents a valuation model for pension benefit guarantees based on discrete timeapproximations of one and two factor models of the term structure, based on the pricing modelsof Ho and Lee (1986), Hull and White (1994a) and (1994b), and Heath, Jarrow, Morton(1991). It is shown that...

Competitive shocks can erode the customer base and thus the information pool of banks. Inferiorinformation quality also reduces the quality of borrowers and may lead to financial instability ofbanks and corporates if risk taking is excessive. Recent theories conjecture that banks can mitigatethe...

Information management is a core process in banking, in particular when lending to small, opaquefirms. But while a more intensive use of information technology (IT) can enhance informationmanagement, it is also costly. Merely increasing IT expenditure may thus not be a panacea tooptimize...

We propose a new approach to measuring the effect of unobservable private information orbeliefs on volatility. Using high-frequency intraday data, we estimate the volatility effect of awell identified shock on the volatility of the stock returns of large European banks as afunction of the...

This paper examines whether recently introduced “village funds”, one of the largestmicrofinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds areanalyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find,first, that they reach the...

This article examines the ability of time-varying Gaussian and Student t copulas to accurately predict the probability of joint extreme co-movements in stock index returns. Using a sample of more than 20 years of daily return observations of the Eurostoxx50 and Dow Jones Industrial stock...

Like all the member states of the European Union, Slovenia was also obligated to implement EUDirectives 2006/48/EC and 2006/49/EC into national banking legislative. Basel II rules were implementedinto Slovenian legislative in December 2006 and have been valid from 1st of January 2007. Before...

One of the greatest challenges in modeling credit portfolio risk is the issue of correlations between borrowers.Up to now no consistent methodology for identifying correlations exists. In general two approachesare employed: “direct” and “indirect” modeling. While the former specify...