The German corporate governance system has long been cited as the standard example of an insider-controlled and stakeholder-oriented system. We argue that despite important reforms and substantial changes of individual elements of the German corporate governance system the main characteristics...

In early July 2019, Christian Sewing, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, proclaimed a fundamental shift of the bank's strategy after finally obtaining the approval of the Supervisory Board, which the management seems to have requested for quite some time. The essential point of the reorientation is a...

This paper aspires to provide an overview of the issue of diversity of banking and financial systems and its development over time from a positive and a normative perspective. In other word: how different are banks within a given country and how much do banking systems and entire financial...

The financial crisis of 2007-08 has stressed the importance of a sound financial system. Unlike other studies weighing the pros and cons of market versus bank-based systems, this paper investigates whether the main elements of the German financial system can be regarded as complementary and...

Previous studies document a relationship between gambling at the aggregate level and investments in securities with lottery-like features. We combine data on individual gambling consumption with portfolio holdings and trading records to examine whether gambling and trading act as substitutes or...

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

The European Commission has published a Green Paper outlining possible measures to create a single market for capital in Europe. Our comments on the Commission's capital markets union project use the functional finance approach as a starting point. Policy decisions, according to the functional...

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with...

Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions but cannot be measured bias-free. We link the time-series of government-controlled tobacco prices to debit/credit card transaction histories to identify smoking as a proxy for...