Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them unique is the combination of accepting...

Individual financial systems can be understood as very specific configurations of certain key elements. Often these configurations remain unchanged for decades. We hypothesize that there is a specific relationship between key elements, namely that of complementarity. Thus, complementarity seems...

This paper is a draft for the chapter German banks and banking structure of the forthcoming book The German financial system . As such, the paper starts out with a description of past and present structural features of the German banking industry. Given the presented empirical evidence it then...

Finance at the Frontier J.D. von Pischke, als Mitarbeiter der Weltbank selbst ein "Praktiker", ist einer der Wortführer der kleinen Gruppe von Autoren, die vor etwa zehn Jahren die gängige Praxis der Entwicklungshilfe im Bereich des Finanzwesens einer radikalen Kritik unterzogen haben. Sein...

A financial system can only perform its function of channelling funds from savers to investors if it offers sufficient assurance to the providers of the funds that they will reap the rewards which have been promised to them. To the extent that this assurance is not provided by contracts alone,...

The German corporate governance system has long been cited as the standard example of an insider-controlled and stakeholder-oriented system. We argue that despite important reforms and substantial changes of individual elements of the German corporate governance system the main characteristics...

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich die drei Merkmale Stakeholderorientierung, Systemhaftigkeit und Stabilität der Corporate Governance speziell für den deutschen Fall beschreiben und analysieren und den skizzierten Zusammenhang zwischen ihnen näher untersuchen. Ich beginne im nächsten Abschnitt...

The paper is a follow-up to an article published in Technique Financière et Developpement in 2000 (see the appendix to the hardcopy version), which portrayed the first results of a new strategy in the field of development finance implemented in South-East Europe. This strategy consists in...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

In a series of recent papers, Mark Roe and Lucian Bebchuk have developed further the concept of path dependence, combined it with concepts of evolution and used it to challenge the wide-spread view that the corporate governance systems of the major advanced economies are likely to converge...