Over the past decades, banks have significantly increased their cross-border asset positions. The ongoing crisis on international financial markets has raised the question whether this increase in cross-border activities has allowed banks to diversify risks and to what extent it has increased...

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

Over the past decades, banks have significantly increased their cross-border asset positions. The ongoing crisis on international financial markets has raised the question whether this increase in cross-border activities has allowed banks to diversify risks and to what extent it has increased...

Die noch immer andauernde Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise zeigt, wie wichtig funktionierende Bankenmärkte für die Stabilität einer Volkswirtschaft sind. Die weltweite Verflechtung der Bankenmärkte ermöglicht einerseits eine stärkere globale Diversifizierung der Bankenrisiken, andererseits...

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...

How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using US data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry ranking...

The theory of relationship lending is based on the idea that close ties between borrowers and banks may be economically beneficial. Information asymmetries on the part of the bank introduce adverse selection and moral hazard problems into the lending process and may lead to lengthy decision...