Assessments of investors’ risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields resultswhich seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding howsuch indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The presentpaper seeks to contribute to this...

From a banking supervisory perspective, this paper analyses aspects of market risk of anaggregated trading portfolio comprised of the trading books of 11 German banks with aregulatory approved internal market risk model. Based on real, clean prot and loss dataand Value-at-Risk estimates of the...

In the last few years it has been possible to observe decreasing interest margins forGerman universal banks. At the same time, institutions increasingly moved partof their business from interest to fee-earning activities. This study analyzes thedeterminants of non-interest income and its impact...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS marketcaused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline inthe CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect whicharises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...

In Germany, the Regulation on the Liquidity of Institutions (formerly Principle II) requiresbanks to have a liquidity ratio which is at least equal to one. This ratio is calculated by dividingregulatorily specified liquid assets that are available within one month by short-term...

Size effects matter in banking. Typically, banking systems are dominated by a smallnumber of large players who are also active in a large range of countries and marketsegments. At the same time, there exist small and often regionally-focused financialinstitutions. This holds also for the German...

The last two decades witnessed fundamental changes in the financial sectors ofindustrialized economies. Deregulation, the removal of entry barriers, the developmentof new financial products and services and technological change continue tospur structural changes in the financial industry. This...

In this paper, we measure the impact of a downturn in the automobile industry on thesolvency of 28 large German banks. The choice of the stressed sector is motivated by theimportant role which the automobile industry plays in the German economy, not the leastbecause of its close ties to other...

The minimisation of the return variance is one of the classical topics of portfolio theory. One of the main difficulties of variance minimisation is the neccessary input factors- variances and covariances- of the assets of the investment universe- are unknown. Often these variances and...

The stochastic frontier analysis (Aigner et al., 1977, Meeusen and van de Broeck, 1977)is widely used to estimate individual efficiency scores. The basic idea lies in the introductionof an additive error term consisting of a noise and an inefficiency term. Most oftenthe assumption of a...