During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

Size effects matter in banking. Typically, banking systems are dominated by a smallnumber of large players who are also active in a large range of countries and marketsegments. At the same time, there exist small and often regionally-focused financialinstitutions. This holds also for the German...

How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using US data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry ranking...

Macroeconomic risks could magnify individual bank risk. Mitigating the influence of economy-wide risks on banks could therefore be very important to maintain a smooth-running banking system. In this paper, we explore the extent to which macroeconomic risks affect banks. We use a bank-level...

During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

Size matters in banking. In this paper, we explore whether shocks originating at large banks affect the probability of distress of smaller banks and thus the stability of the banking system. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step, we follow Gabaix (2008a) and construct a measure of...