The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms'...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...