This paper examines how capital is determined by German banks. We analyse whether the determinants found in the previous empirical literature hold for the special German banking sector with its three characteristic banking groups of savings banks, cooperative banks and other banks. On the basis...

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 this study the firms' choice of the number of bank relationships is analyzed with respect to influential factors like borrower quality, size and the existence of a close housebank relationship. Then, the number of bank relationships is used as a proxy to examine if bank competition is...

This paper discusses the role of internal corporate ratings as a means by which commercial banks condense their informational advantage and preserve it vis-à-vis a competitive lending market. In drawing on a unique data set collected from leading universal banks in Germany, we are able to...

This paper analyzes the empirical relationship between credit default swap, bond and stock markets during the period 2000-2002. Focusing on the intertemporal comovement, we examine weekly and daily lead-lag relationships in a vector autoregressive model and the adjustment between markets caused...

Former studies have shown that people tend to give buying prices that are lower than selling prices. In our study we investigate if this willingness to accept and willingness to pay disparity sustains for state contingent claims. Contingent claims are defined using risky, ambiguous, and...

In subjective expected utility (SEU) the decision weights people attach to events are their beliefs about the likelihood of events. Much empirical evidence, inspired by Ellsberg (1961) and others, shows that people prefer to bet on events they know more about, even when their beliefs are held...

The "disposition effect" is the tendency to sell assets that have gained value ("winners") and keep assets that have lost value ("losers"). Disposition effects can be explained by two elements of prospect theory: The idea that people value gains and losses relative to the initial purchase price...

Competence has been recently proposed as an explanation for the degree of ambiguity aversion. Using general knowledge questions we presented subjects with simple lotteries in which they could bet on an event and against the same event. We show that the sum of certainty equivalents for both bets...