Leasing provides a fundamental source of firm funding, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. A crucial difference from loans and bonds is that the lessor retains ownership rights of the leased asset during the lease term. This facilitates the asset utilization and work-out process...

Several studies have addressed, with conflicting results, the issue of procyclical effects of loan loss provisions in the past. More recently, the weak performance of incurred loss models in the financial crisis has given rise to a new debate on the sound design of credit risk provisioning...

Based on a unique data set of 909 defaulted retail and commercial (self-employed and SMEs) credit customers in Germany, whose original loans were made by 123 different banks, our article confirms a significant positive influence of collateral, and of amicable agreements between the debtor and...

Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...

Theory of financial intermediation gives contradicting answers to the question whether banks should diversify or focus their loan portfolios. Our aim is to find out which of the two strategies is predominant in the German banking market. To this end we measure diversification for all German...