We decompose the change in banks' net interest margin into a change in market-wide bank rates and a change in the balance-sheet composition. Our empirical findings from a detailed data set on German banks' balance-sheet positions, broken down into different maturities, creditors and borrowers...

Group-specific estimations can significantly improve the predictive power of accountingbased rating models. This is shown using a binary logistic regression model applied to the Deutsche Bundesbank's USTAN dataset, which contains 300,000 financial statements provided by German companies for the...

Banking supervision requires regular inspection and assessment of financial institutions. In Germany this task is carried out by the central bank ('Deutsche Bundesbank, BBK') in cooperation with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority ('Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...

We use a unique dataset of German banks' exposure to interest rate risk to derive the following statements about their exposure to this risk and their earnings from term transformation. The systematic factor for the exposure to interest rate risk moves in sync with the shape of the term...