This book is both a reference book on Germany's financial system and a contribution to the economic debate about its status at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In giving a comprehensive account of the many facets of the system, it covers corporate governance, relationship lending,...

Results are reported of a series of nine market experiments with asymmetric information and a fundamental value process that is more 'realistic' than those in previous experiments. Both a call market institution and a continuous double auction mechanism are employed. Considerable pricing...

This paper is the first experimental study of the effects of competition and adverse selection on the performance of market maker (MM-) markets. Information distribution may is either symmetric or heterogeneous. MM-markets are either monopolistic (the specialist markets), or competitive (the...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

The paradigm of self-stabilizing, equilibrating financial markets, respected for a long time, is seriously challenged by the recent financial crisis. Despite sophisticated bank risk management and comprehensive bank supervision interbank and corporate bond markets collapsed in 2007-2009. The...

A financial system can only perform its function of channelling funds from savers to investors if it offers sufficient assurance to the providers of the funds that they will reap the rewards which have been promised to them. To the extent that this assurance is not provided by contracts alone,...