This paper investigates determinants of banks' structural exposure to interest rate risk in their banking book. Using bank-level data for German banks, we find evidence that a bank's exposure to interest rate risk depends on its presumed optimization horizon. The longer the presumed optimization...

This paper explores the extent to which interest risk exposure is priced in bank margins. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: First, we present an extended model of Ho and Saunders (1981) that explicitly captures interest rate risk and returns from maturity transformation. Banks price...

We analyze the dynamics of banks' regulatory capital ratios. Using monthly data of regulatory capital ratios for a subset of large German banks, we estimate the target level and the adjustment speed of the capital ratio for each bank separately. We find evidence that, first, there exists a...

Developments in risk-transfer instruments and risk management techniques in the last two decades have fundamentally changed how banks manage their assets and liabilities. In this document we show that, for all three sectors of German universal banks (private commercial banks, savings banks, and...

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...

This paper investigates determinants of banks' structural exposure to interest rate risk in their banking book. Using bank-level data for German banks, we find evidence that a bank's exposure to interest rate risk depends on its presumed optimization horizon. The longer the presumed optimization...

We investigate German banks' exposure to interest rate risk. In finance, higher demand for a risky asset is typically associated with higher expected return. However, employing a utility function which implies both risk‐averse and risk‐seeking behavior depending on the level of profits, we...

We investigate whether banks actively manage their exposure to interest rate risk in the short run. Using bank-level data of German banks for the period 2011Q4- 2017Q2, we find evidence that banks actively manage their interest rate risk exposure in their banking books: They take account of...

Using unique data of a survey among small and medium-sized German banks, we analyze various aspects of risk management. We especially analyze the effect of a 200-bp increase in the interest level. We find that banks seem to reduce the volatility of their net interest margin by exposing...