The implementation of the Markowitz optimization requires the knowledge of the parameters of the return distribution. These parameters cannot be observed, but have to be estimated. Merton (1980) and Jorion (1985) point out that especially the expected returns are hard to estimate from time...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...

Interest income is the most important source of revenue for most of the banks. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of different interest rate scenarios on the banks' interest income. As we do not know the interest rate sensitivity of real banks, we construct for each bank a portfolio...

We analyze how a single economic risk figure for the Value at Risk of a hypothetical portfolio composed of different commercial banks might be obtained for a supervisor. Using the daily profits and losses and the daily Value at Risk figures of German banks for the period from 2001 to 2004, we...

According to standard portfolio theory, the tangency portfolio is the only efficient stock portfolio. However, empirical studies show that an investment in the global minimum variance portfolio often yields better out-of-sample results than does an investment in the tangency portfolio and...

This paper explores the extent to which interest risk exposure is priced into bank margins. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: First, we extend the Ho and Saunders (1981) model to capture interest rate risk and expected returns from maturity transformation. Banks price interest risk...

Using a unique data set on German banks’ loans to the German real economy, we investigate banks’ credit risk. This data set contains the volume of loans, and write-downs on loans, per bank and industry. Our empirical study for the period 2003–2011 yields the following results: (i)...

We use portfolios of passive investment strategies to replicate the interest risk of banks' banking books. The following empirical statements are derived. (i) Changes in banks' market value and in their net interest income are highly correlated, irrespective of the banks' portfolio composition....

In this paper, we derive two shrinkage estimators for minimum-variance portfolios that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return. The presented results hold for any number of assets and number of observations . The small-sample...

We decompose the change in banks’ net interest margin into a change in market-wide bank rates and a change in balance-sheet composition. The usefulness of this decomposition is illustrated for a detailed data set of German bank balance sheets, broken down into different maturities, creditors...