We exploit a unique sample to analyze how homophily (affinity for similar others) and social ties affect career outcomes in banking. We test if these factors increase the probability that the appointee to an executive board is an outsider without previous employment at the bank compared to being...

We use a structural econometric model to provide empirical evidence that safety nets in the banking industry lead to additional risk taking. To identify the moral hazard effect of bailout expectations on bank risk, we exploit the fact that regional political factors explain bank bailouts but not...

Theoretically, bank's loan monitoring activity hinges critically on its capitalization. To proxy for monitoring intensity, we use changes in borrowers' investment following loan covenant violations, when creditors can intervene in the governance of the firm. Exploiting granular bank-firm...

We use project-level information for the largest regional economic development program in German history to study how government subsidies to firms affect credit markets. We identify credit market responses by considering both, bank lending and firm borrowing during 1998-2019. We find that...

Differences in firm-level productivity explain international activities of non-financial firms quite well. We test whether differences in bank productivity determine international activities of banks. Based on a dataset that allows tracking banks across countries and across different modes of...

The "quiet life hypothesis (QLH)" posits that banks enjoy the advantages of market power in terms of foregone revenues or cost savings. We suggest a unied approach to measure competition and efficiency simultaneously to test this hypothesis. We estimate bank-specific Lerner indices as measures...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

Financial development stimulates growth, in particular in industries dependent on external finance. In this paper we show that more efficient banks are particularly important in stimulating both output and productivity growth, while traditional volume measures of finance are much less important...