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Wenn die AfD hier gewinnt, wären die Folgen überall in Deutschland deutlich zu spürenReint GroppDer Spiegel, 8. Januar 2026
We investigate the role of corporate boards in bank loan contracting. We find that when corporate boards are more independent, both price and nonprice loan terms (e.g., interest rates, collateral, covenants, and performance-pricing provisions) are more favorable, and syndicated loans comprise more lenders. In addition, board size, audit committee structure, and other board characteristics influence bank loan prices. However, they do not consistently affect all nonprice loan terms except for audit committee independence. Our study provides strong evidence that banks recognize the benefits of board monitoring in mitigating information risk ex ante and controlling agency risk ex post, and they reward higher quality boards with more favorable loan contract terms.
Earlier studies have documented that foreign banks charge lower lending rates and interest spreads than domestic banks. We hypothesize that this may stem from the superior efficiency of foreign entrants that they decide to pass onto borrowers (“performance hypothesis”), but could also reflect a different loan allocation with respect to borrower transparency, loan maturity and currency (“portfolio composition hypothesis”). We are able to differentiate between the above hypotheses thanks to a novel dataset containing detailed bank-specific information for the Polish banking industry. Our findings demonstrate that banks differ significantly in terms of portfolio composition and we attest to the “portfolio composition hypothesis” by showing that, having controlled for portfolio composition, there are no differences in lending rates between banks.
I show that more comprehensive corporate disclosure reduces investors’ uncertainty about domestic companies’ payoffs at no cost, thereby decreasing investors’ equity home bias toward a country. Since investors should base their investment decisions on valid and easily interpretable company information only, more comprehensive disclosure will reduce the home bias only if domestic securities law is sufficiently stratified and domestic companies use international accounting standards. Using panel data for 38 countries from 2003 to 2008 I find that more comprehensive disclosure reduces investors’ home bias, though significantly only for countries that sufficiently enforce their securities law and implement international accounting standards.
We propose a new approach to measuring the effect of unobservable private information on volatility. Using intraday data, we estimate the effect of a well-identified shock on the volatility of stock returns of European banks as a function of the quality of public information available about the banks. We hypothesize that as publicly available information becomes stale, volatility effects and its persistence increase, as private information of investors becomes more important. We find strong support for this idea in the data. We further show that stock volatility is higher just before important announcements if information is stale.
I study the impact of banking and sovereign debt crisis risk of EMU member states on the external value of the euro. Using a regime switching model, I find that the external value of the euro has significantly responded to financial crisis risk during the period of November 2008–November 2011, while no significant effect is found for the period from February 2006 to October 2008. This suggests that the monetary expansion and interest rate cuts associated with the ECB's “non-standard” measures may have reduced the external value of the euro.
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 bank risk. The sample includes all observed capital preservation measures and distressed exits in the German banking industry during 1995–2006. A change of bailout expectations by two standard deviations increases the probability of official distress from 6.6% to 9.4%, which is economically significant.
This article explores the determinants of banking sector fragility in the eurozone. For this purpose, a stock-market-based banking sector fragility indicator is calculated for eight member countries from 1999 to 2009 using the Merton model (1974). Using a panel framework, it is found that the macroeconomic environment, the structure of the banking sector and the intensity of banking regulation all have an effect on banking sector fragility in the eurozone.
The ‘Quiet Life Hypothesis (QLH)’ posits that banks with market power have less incentives to maximize revenues and minimize cost. Especially government owned banks with a public mandate precluding profit maximization might succumb to a quiet life. We use a unified approach that simultaneously measures market power and efficiency to test the quiet life hypothesis of German savings banks. We find that average local market power declined between 1996 and 2006. Cost and profit efficiency remained constant. Nonparametric correlations are consistent with a quiet life regarding cost efficiency but not regarding profit efficiency. The quiet life on the cost side is negatively correlated with bank size, quality of loan portfolio and local per capita income. The last result indicates that the quiet cost life is therefore potentially due to benevolent excess consumption of local input factors by public savings banks.
Cet article passe en revue la littérature sur l’allocation de crédit et la création de valeur par les banques. Il se concentre sur l’activité de banque relationnelle, à savoir le fait qu’une banque et un emprunteur se lancent dans de multiples interactions et que chacun des deux agents s’efforce d’obtenir des informations spécifiques sur l’autre. Il montre comment la banque relationnelle génère des coûts et des bénéfices à la fois pour les entreprises et pour les banques, mais qu’en règle générale, elle est source de valeur pour chacun d’eux. Néanmoins, l’incidence de ce type de relation est en grande partie fonction du contexte économique (période normale ou période de crise). Est aussi abordée la manière dont l’allocation de crédit, mesurée par la spécialisation sectorielle, affecte les entreprises et les banques. Enfin, l’examen de la littérature récente en matière de titrisation et de relation bancaire permet de mettre en évidence la manière dont la titrisation affecte les effets de la banque relationnelle.
I test whether more investor attention leads to a better exploitation of arbitrage opportunities and, in turn, to less mispricing of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs). Using data on 536 stocks I find that more investor attention significantly reduces ADR mispricing.
