Several investigations came to the conclusion that, considering in retrospect, most Mergers &Acquisitions were not successful. Differences in the corporate cultures are often quoted asbeing responsible for the failures. So, the question arises how such failures can be preventedin future....

China’s banking market is one of the most attractive investment targets for financial institutionsworldwide especially since the opening up of the market in December 2006. Based oninterviews with experts this paper analyses the question of benefits and risks of foreign directinvestments into...

The work report first describes the current developments on the German market for nonperformingloans, which after its peak in spring 2007 is now also affected by the financialcrisis. The sale of small and medium-size portfolios is described within the scope of a casestudy. Furthermore, the...

Private equity has seen an impressive activity surge in Germany over the last ten years. Thisworking paper meets the increasing thirst for information on the German buyout market withan overview of its historic development, a quantitative analysis of its performance and a futureoutlook. While...

Generally, information provision and certi¯cation have been identi¯ed as the majoreconomic functions of rating agencies. This paper analyzes whether the \watchlist"(rating review) instrument has extended the agencies' role towards a monitoringposition, as proposed by Boot, Milbourn, and...

This paper explores approaches to measure the performance of the internal audit function.Based upon three proposed dimensions of formal internal audit performance – material performance,cost and risk – it uses competence research methodology to characterize and structureinternal audit...

Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit steht die Analyse der Vor- und Nachteile einer geglätte-ten versus aktuellen Informationsbasis in einem theoretischen Modell. Am Beispielstabiler Agency-Ratings und volatiler marktbasierter Ratings zeigt sich, dass die Ef-fekte der Berichtsmethode von den...

Within the last decade, credit risk management of financial institutions has been subject to major changes due to the development of the credit derivatives market. In the past, financial institutions merely had the possibility to manage their credit portfolio by either approving or refusing a...

Investment decisions of cooperative banks are very restricted to their risk capacity. A well defined and organised Risk Management Process supports those investment activities and assists to achieve a balanced situation between risk and return.Several ways can be chosen to allocate risk capital....

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic relationships between some key variables for the euro area by means of a systems approach (i.e. so-called Vector Autoregression) and to simulate their responses with respect to monetary policy shocks. The main result is that rather simple...