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...

Management scholars have long stressed the importance of evolutionary processses for inter-firm cooperation but have mostly missed the promising opportunity to incorporate ideas from evolutionary theories into the analysis of collaborative arrangements. In this paper, we first present three...

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...

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...

In this paper, we show the importance of accounting for heterogeneity among sample firms in stochastic frontier analysis. For a fairly homogenous sample of German savings and cooperative banks, we analyze how alternative theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of heterogeneity can be...

Im Rahmen des vorliegenden Bandes arbeitet der Verfasser heraus, dass es grundsätzlich auch für kleinere Banken möglich ist, entsprechende Verfahren einzuführen. Voraussetzung dafür ist allerdings, dass die Thematik seitens der Bank offensiv und engagiert angegangen wird, man sich...

Microfinance is not a recent development, and neither is the development of regulation and supervision of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Every now developed country has its own history of microfinance. It is important to recognize this because it presents a view different from that of many in...