Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of a housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. In...

The paper investigates the impact of corporate governance on the performance of 361 German corporations over the time period 1991 to 1996. We find ownership concentration to affect profitability significantly negatively. Representation of owners on the board of executive directors does not make...

Pricing of cap insurance contracts is considered for political mortgage rates. A simple stochastic process for mortgage rates is proposed. The process is based on renewal processes for modelling the length of periods with downward and upward trend respectively. Prices are calculated by...

This paper delineates the simultaneous impact of non-anticipated information on mean and variance of the intraday return process by including appropriate variables accounting for the news flow into both the mean and the variance function. This allows us to differentiate between the consistent...

This paper presents structural estimates for a bargaining model which nests the right-to-manage, the efficient wage bargaining, the seniority and the standard neo- classical labor demand model as special cases. In contrast to most existing models, our approach accounts for heterogeneous skill...

When making decisions, agents tend to make use of decisions others have made in similar situations. Ignoring this behavior in empirical models can be interpreted as a problem of omitted variables and may seriously bias parameter estimates and harm inference. We suggest a possibility of...

This paper describes simple econometric methods for the analysis of credit risk and applies them to a data set obtained from credit files taken from six large German universal banks. The paper focuses on (i) binary and ordered probit/logit models which enable the credit analyst to quantify the...