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...

Despite significant progress in this area, the problem of non-performing loans continues to receive central attention in the banking systems of the SEE countries after the 2008/2009 crisis, reducing the profitability and resource utilization of banks. The purpose of this paper is to investigate...

This paper analyses empirically the role of bank lending in monetary policy transmission on the basis of Greek bank level data. Two approaches have been taken. One employing a reduced form equation linking monetary policy and distributional variables to bank loans in the spirit of Kashyap and...

Since March 2020 the Eurosystem has provided subsidies to Euro-Area banks, via its Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO). Under this program, banks can borrow from the Eurosystem at a rate as low as -1%, conditional on their lending to the real economy. This paper uses a simple...

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...