The regulatory architecture of the financial system has significantly changed after the global financial crisis of 2008/09. In Europe, the introduction of the Single Rulebook has been a major change and provides the legal foundation for the European Banking Union (EBU). The Single Rulebook consists of a regulation, the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR), and three main directives targeting capital regulation and compensation of managers, harmonization of deposit insurance schemes, as well as resolution and restructuring rules (Capital Requirements Directive (CRD IV), Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive (DGSD), Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD)).

This study examines whether the flow volatility experienced by institutional investors affects firms’ financing costs. Using Greenwood and Thesmar’s (2011) stock price fragility measure, we find that there is a positive relationship between fragility and firms’ costs of bank loans. This effect is most pronounced when lenders rely more on institutional shareholders to discipline corporate management, or when loans are made by relationship lenders, suggesting that unstable flows could weaken institutional investors’ monitoring effectiveness and strengthen relationship banks’ bargaining power.

Die Dissertation untersucht verschiedene Einflussfaktoren auf die Finanzierungskosten von Staaten. Dabei werden die Eurokrise, Rohstoffpreise und Klimawandel als drei wesentliche Einflussfaktoren herangezogen und deren empirische Wichtigkeit statistisch untersucht. Ein weiterer Artikel beschäftigt sich mit der Integration von Finanzmärkten auf die Ausbreitung von Konjunkturzyklen.

This paper investigates how syndicated lenders react to borrowers’ rating changes under heterogeneous conditions and different regulatory regimes. Our findings suggest that corporate downgrades that increase capital requirements for lending banks under the Basel II framework are associated with increased loan spreads and deteriorating non-price loan terms relative to downgrades that do not affect capital requirements. Ratings exert an asymmetric impact on loan spreads, as these remain unresponsive to rating upgrades, even when the latter are associated with a reduction in risk weights for corporate loans. The increase in firm borrowing costs is mitigated in the presence of previous bank-firm lending relationships and for borrowers with relatively strong performance, high cash flows and low leverage.

Die Arbeit untersucht die Wechselwirkungen zwischen der Mikro- und Makroebene, indem die Auswirkungen von Informationen auf der Mikroebene auf die Dynamik von aggregierten Investitionen betrachtet werden. In einem weiteren Beitrag wird untersucht, inwieweit Stress auf der Ebene der staatlichen Refinanzierung und Bankenstress zum Anstieg sowohl des Niveaus als auch der Heterogenität der Refinanzierungskosten nicht-finanzieller Unternehmen in der Eurozone während der europäischen Schuldenkrise beigetragen haben und wie sie den monetären Transmissionsmechanismus beeinflusst haben. Im 3. Forschungspapier wird analysiert, wie Investitionen auf Unternehmensebene durch Interaktionen zwischen dem Unternehmen und der Gesamtebene in der Eurozone beeinflusst werden.

The bank recovery and resolution directive (BRRD) regulates the bail-in hierarchy to resolve distressed banks without burdening tax payers. We exploit the staggered implementation of the BRRD across 15 European Union (EU) member states to identify banks’ capital cost and capital structure responses. In a first stage, we show that average capital costs of banks increased. WACC hikes are lowest in the core countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) compared to formerly stressed EMU and non-EMU countries. This pattern is driven by changes in the relative WACC weight of equity in response to the BRRD, which indicates enhanced financial system resilience. In a second stage, we document asymmetric transmission patterns of banks’ capital cost changes on to corporates’ borrowing terms. Only EMU banks located in core countries that exhibit higher WACC are those that also increase firms’ borrowing cost and contract credit supply. Hence, the BRRD had unintended consequences for selected segments of the real economy.

This study examines whether and to what extend global equity offerings at the IPO stage may affect issuing firms' ability to borrow in the domestic debt market. Tracking bank loans taken by U.S. IPO firms in the domestic syndicated loan market, we observe that global equity offering firms experience more favorable loan price than that offered to their domestic counterparts. This finding holds for a set of robustness tests of endogeneity issues. We also find that, compared with their domestic counterparts, global equity offering firms are less likely to have financial distress, engage more in international diversification, and are more likely to wait a longer time to apply for syndicated loans.