The opportunity of building up visible “Reserves for General Banking Risks” by the bank management represents a peculiarity in the German financial accounting framework for banks. We investigate German banks' motives for the creation and usage of these reserves and assess their role in...

This study investigates the development of income-decreasing discretionary expenses surrounding CEO turnovers at banks. We expect incoming CEOs to take an earnings bath during the initial stage of their tenure. For a sample of German banks over the period 1993-2012, we document that (1) incoming...

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...

Several studies have addressed, with conflicting results, the issue of procyclical effects of loan loss provisions in the past. More recently, the weak performance of incurred loss models in the financial crisis has given rise to a new debate on the sound design of credit risk provisioning...

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,...

Existing research documents that incoming CEOs in non-financial firms tend to take an “earnings bath”. They reduce their first year’s profits through discretionary expenses, blame the “bad outcome” on their predecessors, lower the performance benchmark, and save income for subsequent...

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...

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...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...