Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

In this paper, we examine how the institutional design affects the outcome of bank bailout decisions. In the German savings bank sector, distress events can be resolved by local politicians or a state-level association. We show that decisions by local politicians with close links to the bank are...

Banking supervision requires regular inspection and assessment of financial institutions. In Germany this task is carried out by the central bank ('Deutsche Bundesbank, BBK') in cooperation with the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority ('Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,...

In this paper, we introduce a continuous and forward-looking stability indicator for the banking system based on information on all financial institutions in Germany between 1995 and 2010. Explaining this indicator by means of panel regression techniques, we identify significant macroprudential...

We exploit a unique sample to analyze how homophily (affinity for similar others) and social ties affect career outcomes in banking. We test if these factors increase the probability that the appointee to an executive board is an outsider without previous employment at the bank compared to being...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

Little is known about how socioeconomic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we show how age, gender, and education composition of executive teams affect risk taking of financial institutions. First, we establish that age,...

Little is known about how the demographic characteristics of executive teams affect corporate governance in banking. Exploiting a unique dataset, we investigate how age, gender, and educational composition of executive teams affect the portfolio risk of financial institutions. Using...

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...

Over the past two decades, Germany experienced several periods of banking system instability rather than full-blown banking system crises. In this paper we introduce a continuous and forward-looking stability indicator for the banking system based on information on all financial institutions in...