Summary Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them “unique” is the combination of...

[fre] Cet article tente de répondre à la question : y a-t-il eu des changements structurels dans le système bancaire allemand et y en aura-t-il dans le futur ? On ne peut répondre à ces questions qu’en tenant compte des spécificités de ce système et de sa dépendance vis-à-vis de...

We use two data sets, one from a large brokerage and another from a major bank, to ask: (i) whether financial advisors are more likely to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer and experienced investors; (ii) how advised accounts actually perform relative to self-managed...

Working with one of the largest brokerages in Germany, we record what happens when unbiased investment advice is offered to a random set of approximately 8,000 active retail customers out of the brokerage's several hundred thousand retail customers. We find that investors who most need the...

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

We use panel data from nine countries over the period 1996-2008 to test how revenue diversification affects bank value. Relying on a comprehensive framework for bank performance measurement, we find robust evidence against a conglomerate discount, unlike studies concerned with industrial firms....

The study shows that multi-bank loan pool contracts improve the risk-return profile of banks' loan business. Banks write simple contracts on the proceeds from pooled loan portfolios, taking into account the free-rider problems in joint loan production. Thereby especially smaller banks benefit...