We show that the speed and type of corporate deleveraging depends on the interaction between corporate and financial sector health. Based on granular bank-firm data pertaining to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) from five stressed and two non-stressed euro area economies, we show that...

Asset purchase programmes (APPs) may insulate banks from having to terminate relationships with unproductive customers. Using administrative plant and bank data, we test whether APPs impinge on industry dynamics in terms of plant entry and exit. Plants in Germany connected to banks with access...

We test if and how banks adjust their lending in response to disaster risk in the form of a natural catastrophe striking its customers: the 2013 Elbe flooding. The flood affected firms in East and South Germany, and we identify shocked banks based on bank-firm relationships gathered for more...

We identify the determinants of all German banks’ sovereign debt exposures between 2005 and 2013 and test for the implications of these exposures for bank risk. Larger, more capital market affine, and less capitalised banks hold more sovereign bonds. Around 15% of all German banks never hold...

We study if the regulation of bank executive compensation has unintended consequences. Based on novel data on CEO and non-CEO executives in EU banking, we show that capping the variable-to-fixed compensation ratio did not induce executives to abandon the industry. Banks indemnified executives...

We show that local banks provide corporate recovery lending to firms affected by adverse regional macro shocks. Banks that reside in counties unaffected by the natural disaster that we specify as macro shock increase lending to firms inside affected counties by 3%. Firms domiciled in flooded...

We investigate the (unintended) effects of bank executive compensation regulation. Capping the share of variable compensation did not induce an executive director exodus from EU banking because banks raised fixed compensation sufficiently to retain executives. However, risk-adjusted bank...

Does bank instability push borrowers to use crowdfunding as a source of external finance? We identify stressed banks and link them to a unique, manually constructed sample of 157 new ventures seeking equity crowdfunding. The sample comprises projects from all German equity crowdfunding platforms...

We show that around one third of executive directors on the boards of national supervisory authorities (NSA) in European banking have an employment history in the financial industry. The appointment of executives without a finance background associates with negative valuation effects....