In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firm's risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated...