In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

With the establishment of the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin) in May 2002 Germany followed the trend towards integrated financial supervision. The main reason for unification of supervision is the growing integration of financial sectors leading to the blurring of...