This paper analyzes the determinants of the interest margin of German banks over the period 1995-2007, explicitly addressing differences among different bank groups. We use three empirical models to focus on the following aspects: the time evolution of the interest margin, the average...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the interest margin of German banks over the period 1995–2007, explicitly addressing differences among different bank groups. We use three empirical models to focus on the following aspects: the time evolution of the interest margin, the average...

The aim of the paper is to show how changes in interest rate behavior, characterized in terms of stochastic orders of rate distributions, affect the banking industry. The basic feature of a banking firm is of a financial intermediary holding highly illiquid assets in the presence of liabilities...

We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

Durch die fortschreitende Integration der Finanzmärkte können Entwicklungen in einem Land zum Teil verheerende Auswirkungen auf die Stabilität des Finanzsystems in einem anderen Land haben. Verlangt die Globalisierung der Finanzmärkte nach einer globalen Regulierungsarchitektur? Alexander...

We compare two different approaches to assess country default risk by evaluating their forecast accuracy. In particular we analyze whether market based or rating based risk assessment is superior. To evaluate the forecast accuracy we analyze the differences between several default risk measures...

We address the problem how to estimate default probabilities for sovereign countries based on market data of traded debt. A structural Merton-type model is applied to a sample of emerging market and transition countries. In this context, only few and heterogeneous default probabilities are...

This paper investigates contagion effects. In a model with highly and lowly informed investors we show that a currency crisis in one country can trigger a crisis in another country. Portfolio losses of the highly informed investors in one country will force them to withdraw capital from the...