Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...

Banking supervision requires regular inspection and assessment of financial institutions. In Germany this task is carried out by the central bank (“Deutsche Bundesbank, BBK”) in cooperation with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (“Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

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...

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...

Theory of financial intermediation gives contradicting answers to the question whether banks should diversify or focus their loan portfolios. Our aim is to find out which of the two strategies is predominant in the German banking market. To this end we measure diversification for all German...