How does bank distress impact their customers' probability of default and trade credit availability? We address this question by looking at a unique sample of German firms from 2000 to 2011. We follow their firm-bank relationships through times of distress and crisis, featuring the different...

How does bank distress impact their customers' probability of default and trade credit availability? We address this question by looking at a unique sample of German firms from 2000 to 2011. We follow their firm-bank relationships through times of distress and crisis, featuring the different...

Financial assistance provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is supposed to unlock other financing, acting as a catalyst for private capital flows. The empirical evidence of the presence of such a catalytic effect has, however, been mixed. This paper shows that a possible explanation...

The transformation of credit scores into probabilities of default plays an important role in credit risk estimation. The linear logistic regression has developed into a standard calibration approach in the banking sector. With the advent of machine learning techniques in the discriminatory phase...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors" as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany that effectively...

Cost and profit efficiency (CE and PE) are key to evaluate bank performance. But efficiency improvements may imply deteriorating profitability and excessive risk-taking. The dynamic reactions of performance in response to efficiency changes remain unclear on both theoretical and empirical...

The transformation of credit scores into probabilities of default plays an important role in credit risk estimation. The linear logistic regression has developed into a standard calibration approach in the banking sector. With the advent of machine learning techniques in the discriminatory phase...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors" as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany that effectively...

How do real interest rates affect financial fragility? We study this issue in a model in which bank borrowing is subject to rollover risk. A bank's optimal borrowing trades off the benefit from investing additional funds into profitable assets with the cost of greater risk of a run by bank...

Despite the ongoing consolidation trend in the banking industry and the attention some mergers (in particular between large banks) have been receiving, there is no consistent picture of the impact of mergers on the stability of the financial system. In this paper, we aim to provide a universal...