A widely recognized paper by Colin Mayer (1988) has led to a profound revision of academic thinking about financing patterns of corporations in different countries. Using flow-of-funds data instead of balance sheet data, Mayer and others who followed his lead found that internal financing is the...

This paper is a draft for the chapter quot;German Banks and Banking Structurequot; of the forthcoming book quot;The German Financial Systemquot; edited by J.P. Krahnen and R.H. Schmidt (Oxford University Press). As such, the paper starts out with a description of past and present structural...

We use two data sets, one from a large brokerage and another from a major bank, to ask: (i) whether financial advisors are more likely to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer and experienced investors; (ii) how advised accounts actually perform relative to self-managed...

Does BPO pay off at the firm-level? Although there are several studies which analyze the potential benefits of BPO, there is a virtual absence of research papers on BPO outcomes. Based on an analysis of 137 Business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures at 254 German banks in a period between 1994...

This paper empirically investigates a novel approach for financial advisors to enhance customer satisfaction by segmenting customers based on their financial sophistication. We surveyed 761 customers of two German retail banks on their satisfaction with their latest purchase of an investment...

We show that multi-bank loan pools improve the risk-return profile of regional banks' loan business. Banks write simple contracts on the proceeds from pooled loan portfolios, taking into account the agency problems in joint loan production. Thereby, banks benefit from diversifying credit risk...

We use panel data from nine countries over the period 1996 to 2003 to test how revenue diversification in conjunction with increasing bank size affects bank value. Using a comprehensive framework for bank performance measurement, we find no evidence for a conglomerate discount, unlike studies...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alleged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

This paper shows that abnormal stock price returns around the date of open market repurchase announcements are four times higher in Germany than in the US (12% versus 3%). We hypothesize that this observation can be explained by national differences in repurchase regulations. Our empirical...

Why do people trade? Because they are told to! Using a unique dataset from a large German bank, we find that retail investors who report that they rely heavily on their advisors’ recommendations have a substantially higher trading volume and purchase a higher fraction of investment products...