A healthy banking system is a fundamental condition for financial stability. When assessing the riskiness of the banking system, analysts often restrict their focus to large banks. This may create a distorted picture in countries like Germany with fragmented banking systems. In Germany, savings...

The Value at Risk of a portfolio differs from the sum of the Values at Risk of the portfolio's components. In this paper, we analyze the problem of how a single economic risk figure for the Value at Risk of a hypothetical portfolio composed of different commercial banks might be obtained for a...

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...

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...

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...

Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks? profitability (ROA) and their portfolio...

Ongoing financial innovation and greater information availability increase the tradability of bank assets and reduce banks' dependence on individual bank managers as private information in the lending process declines. In this paper we argue that this has two effects on banks, with opposing...

Evidence on the interdependency between monetary policy and the state of the banking system is scarce. We suggest an integrated micro-macro approach with two core virtues. First, we measure the probability of bank distress directly at the bank level. Second, we integrate a microeconomic hazard...

In this paper we investigate the interaction between a credit portfolio and another risk type, which can be thought of as market risk. Combining Merton-like factor models for credit risk with linear factor models for market risk, we analytically calculate their interrisk correlation and show how...

Der aktuell diskutierte Gesetzentwurf für eine Reform der Einlagensicherung in Weißrussland verfolgt das Hauptziel, mehr Sparmittel der Bevölkerung für das planwirtschaftliche Wirtschaftssystem verfügbar zu machen. Bei einer nicht passgenau auf die Landessituation abgestimmten Ausgestaltung...