This study investigates the development of income-decreasing discretionary expenses surrounding CEO turnovers at banks. We expect incoming CEOs to take an earnings bath during the initial stage of their tenure. For a sample of German banks over the period 1993-2012, we document that (1) incoming...

Several studies have addressed, with conflicting results, the issue of procyclical effects of loan loss provisions in the past. More recently, the weak performance of incurred loss models in the financial crisis has given rise to a new debate on the sound design of credit risk provisioning...

Several studies have addressed, with conflicting results, the issue of procyclical effects of loan loss provisions in the past. More recently, the weak performance of incurred loss models in the financial crisis has given rise to a new debate on the sound design of credit risk provisioning...

This study investigates the development of income-decreasing discretionary expenses surrounding CEO turnovers at banks. We expect incoming CEOs to take an earnings bath during the initial stage of their tenure. For a sample of German banks over the period 1993-2012, we document that (1) incoming...

This paper introduces a stress test of the corporate credit portfolios of 24 large German banks by a two-stage approach: First, a macro-econometric model is used to forecast the impact of a substantial increase of the user cost of business capital for firms worldwide on three particularly...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

Over the past two decades, Germany experienced several periods of banking system instability rather than full-blown banking system crises. In this paper we introduce a continuous and forward-looking stability indicator for the banking system based on information on all financial institutions in...

We investigate financial intermediaries' interest rate risk management as the simultaneous decision of on-balance-sheet exposure and interest rate swap use. Our findings show that both decisions are substitute risk management strategies. A higher likelihood of bank distress makes banks reduce...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...

Excessive credit creation by banks was at the root of the recent financial crisis. Nevertheless, micro-prudential regulation lacks a clear methodology to identify these banks. Combining arguments from banking and auction theory, we show that overoptimism causes excessive lending, subsequently...