Capital requirements play a key role in the supervision and regulation of banks. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is now changing the current framework by introducing risk-sensitive capital charges. There have been concerns that this will unduly increase volatility in the banks'...

This paper analyzes the effect of the business cycle on the regulatory capital buffer of German savings and cooperative banks in the period 1993-2003. The capital buffer is found to fluctuate anticyclically over the business cycle. The fluctuation is stronger for savings banks than for...

This paper shows that the substantial disparity in German bank lending towards industrial (IC) and non-industrial (Non-IC) countries is largely explained by differences in countries' endowments and only to a minor extent by German banks' different treatment of these country groups. This is...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...

This paper analyzes the individual bidding behaviour of German banks in the money market auctions conducted by the ECB from the beginning of the third quarter of 2000 to the end of the first quarter of 2001. Our approach takes a variety of characteristics of the individual banks into account. In...

Recent empirical studies criticize the sluggish financial integration in the euro area and find that only interbank money markets are fully integrated so far. This paper studies the optimal regional and/or sectoral integration of financial systems given that integration is restricted to the...

German banks experienced a merger wave throughout the 1990s. However, the success of bank mergers remains a continuous matter of debate. In this paper we suggest a taxonomy as how to evaluate post-merger performance on the basis of cost efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that...

In this paper we focus on the analysis of the effect of prediction and estimation risk on the loss distribution, risk measures and economic capital. When variables for the determination of probability of default and loss distribution have to be predicted because they are not available at the...

In this paper, we show the importance of accounting for heterogeneity among sample firms in stochastic frontier analysis. For a fairly homogenous sample of German savings and cooperative banks, we analyze how alternative theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of heterogeneity can be...

With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...