After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a rapid and far-reaching shrinkage of international banks’ assets with a focus on foreign claims took place. For the largest 67 German banking groups, we find that both their characteristics and behavior in the pre-crisis episode had repercussions for the...

Did policy interventions contribute to the gradual segmentation of lending markets starting with the 2007 - 2008 global financial crisis? We investigate this question in an international Cournot duopoly model under an equity constraint. Two symmetric multinational banks compete for corporate...

This paper investigates how multinational banks use internal debt to shift profits to low-taxed affiliates. Using regulatory data on multinational banks headquartered in Germany, we show that banks use this tax avoidance channel more aggressively than non-financial multinationals do. We find...

Why do residential mortgages carry a fixed or an adjustable interest rate? To answer this question we study unique data from 103 banks belonging to 73 different banking groups across twelve countries in the euro area. To explain the large cross-country and time variation observed, we distinguish...

European banks are exposed to a substantial amount of risky sovereign debt. The "missing bank capital" resulting from the zero-risk weight exemption for European banks for European sovereign debt amplifies the co-movement between sovereign CDS spreads and facilitates cross-border...

The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis. In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform...

We simulate how the probability of failure of a subsidiary and the group changes after a capital buffer is imposed on the group as a whole and/or the subsidiary. The simulation takes into account the relative sizes of the parent and the subsidiary, the parent's share in the subsidiary, the...

Merger and acquisition (M&A) is a mechanism for promoting corporate governance suggesting that an improvement in overall corporate governance may have a negative effect on M&A activity. Since M&A foreign direct investment (FDI) is a cross-border variant of M&A, stronger corporate governance may...

This study investigates the determinants of adjustments in the provision of cross-border loans by internationally active banks. For the period from 2002 to 2010, we look at quarterly transaction data (excluding valuation effects) on long-term loans issued by the largest 69 German banking groups...

We investigate how the lending activities of a multinational bank’s affiliates located abroad are affected by funding difficulties in view of the financial crisis. For this, we consider transaction-induced changes in long-term lending to the private sector of 40 countries by the affiliates of...