Tax fraud is a serious problem for fiscal authorities worldwide, not only in countries regarded as hightax like Germany. Besides longterm tax reforms, tax amnesties are used to bring back taxable amounts into the legal sector. The German tax amnesty of 2004/2005 was one of the last examples in...

In May 2004 the CFO Forum harmonized the various efforts of reporting the embedded valueof life insurance companies by issuing the European Embedded Value (EEV) Principles.In this working paper a methodology is proposed to derive a maximum lending amountfrom EEV figures without much additional...

This paper explores approaches to measure the performance of the internal audit function. Based upon three proposed dimensions of formal internal audit performance - material performance, cost and risk - it uses competence research methodology to characterize and structure internal audit...

SMEs play a crucial role for European economies. The numbers show the high importance of SMEs for national economies. Accordingly, it is no surprise that the regulatory framework SMEs are imbedded in is the subject of an important political discussion. In the discussion it is frequently...

The study examines the influence of public expenditure on economic growth in Germany. According to growth theory the effect of public spending on growth is not definite, but the result of a linear regression based on the period 1961-2002 indicates a negative relationship. The next part is...

This paper examines the treatment of sovereign debt exposure within the Basel framework and measures the impact of bank regulation on the demand of Monetary Financial Institutions (MFI) for marketable sovereign debt. Our results suggest that bank regulation has a significant positive impact on...

Das Geschäft mit Derivaten und strukturierten Finanzprodukten ist verstärkter Kritik ausgesetzt. Ziel des Aufsatzes ist die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den Thesen der Kritiker und der Rolle der Bank bei den genannten Geschäften.

This work extends the contagion model introduced by Nier et al. (2007) to inhomogeneous networks. We preserve the convenient description of a financial system by a sparsely parameterized random graph but add several relevant inhomogeneities, namely well-connected banks, financial institutions...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

Auctions are supposed to procure the best deal money can buy. Yet, practitioners who procure complex contracts by auction are well aware of some basic pitfalls. One concern is that winning bids may not reflect the quality of the bidder but strategic behavior like low-balling bids or...