The savings banks? decision to distribute profits among their public owners is strongly regulated by law in order to guarantee their adequate funding via retained profits. However, the legal scope is reluctantly exhausted. In this study we examine the determinants of the savings banks? payout...

In contrast to earlier field studies, we survey German public savings banks on their management of capital. We find that the most important determinants of the savings banks? target capital ratio are risk aversion, the desired credit growth and profitability. Savings banks prefer to manage the...

This paper starts out by pointing out the challenges and weaknesses which the German banking systems faces according to the prevailing views among national and international observers. These challenges include a general problem of profitability and, possibly as its main reason, the strong role...

The resilience of the German banking system is studied on the semiaggregated level from 1968 to 2022. We distinguish between Large Banks, Regional Banks, Landesbanken, Sparkassen and Credit Unions and study their z-scores as a measure of resilience in response to the monetary policy stances of...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...

The aim of this paper is to assess how German savings banks adjust capital and risk under capital regulation. We estimate a modified version of the model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992). This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we test the capital buffer theory...

This paper analyzes the effect of the business cycle on the regulatory capital buffer of German savings and cooperative banks in the period 1993-2003. The capital buffer is found to fluctuate anticyclically over the business cycle. The fluctuation is stronger for savings banks than for...