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We identify the determinants of all German banks' sovereign debt exposures between 2005 and 2013 and test for the implications of these exposures for bank risk. Larger, more capital market affine, and less capitalised banks hold more sovereign bonds. Around 15% of all German banks never hold sovereign bonds during the sample period. The sensitivity of sovereign bond holdings by banks to eurozone membership and inflation increased significantly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis, banks prefer sovereigns with lower debt ratios and lower bond yields. Finally, we find that riskiness of government bond holdings affects bank risk only since 2010.This confirms the existence of a nexus between government debt and bank risk.

The economic and financial crisis that emerged in 2008 also initiated an intense discussion on macroeconomic research and the role of economists in society. The debate focuses on three main issues. Firstly, it is argued that economists failed to predict the crisis and to design early warning systems. Secondly, it is claimed that economists use models of the macroeconomy which fail to integrate financial markets and which are inadequate to model large economic crises. Thirdly, the issue has been raised that economists invoke unrealistic assumptions concerning human behaviour by assuming that all agents are self-centred, rationally optimizing individuals. In this paper, we focus on the first two issues. Overall, our thrust is that the above statements are a caricature of modern economic theory and empirics. A rich field of research developed already before the crisis and picked up shortcomings of previous models.

Bank distress can have severe negative consequences for the stability of the financial system, the real economy, and public finances. Regimes for restructuring and restoring banks financed by bank levies and fiscal backstops seek to reduce these costs. Bank levies attempt to internalize systemic risk and increase the costs of leverage. This paper evaluates the effects of the German bank levy implemented in 2011 as part of the German bank restructuring law. Our analysis offers three main insights. First, revenues raised through the bank levy are minimal, because of low tax rates and high thresholds for tax exemptions. Second, the bulk of the payments were contributed by large commercial banks and the head institutes of savings banks and credit unions. Third, the levy had no effect on the volume of loans or interest rates for the average German bank. For the banks affected most by the levy, we find evidence of fewer loans, higher lending rates, and lower deposit rates.

Activities of international banks have been at the core of discussions on the causes and effects of the international financial crisis. Yet, we know little about the actual magnitudes and mechanisms for transmission of liquidity shocks through international banks, including the reasons for heterogeneity in transmission across banks. The International Banking Research Network (IBRN), established in 2012, brings together researchers from around the world with access to micro-data on individual banks to analyze issues pertaining to global banks. This paper summarizes the common methodology and results of empirical studies conducted in 11 countries to explore liquidity risk transmission. Among the main results is, first, that explanatory power of the empirical model is higher for domestic lending than for international lending. Second, how liquidity risk affects bank lending depends on the whether the banks are drawing on official sector liquidity facilities. Third, liquidity management across global banks can be important for liquidity risk transmission into lending. Fourth, there is substantial heterogeneity in the balance sheet characteristics that affect banks' responses to liquidity risk. Overall, bank balance sheet characteristics matter for differentiating lending responses across banks mainly in the realm of cross-border lending.

Bank distress can have severe negative consequences for the stability of the financial system, the real economy, and for public finances. Regimes for the restructuring and resolution of banks, financed by bank levies and fiscal backstops, seek to reduce these costs. Bank levies attempt to internalize systemic risk and to increase the costs of leverage. This paper evaluates the effects of the German bank levy implemented in 2011 as part of the German Bank Restructuring Act. Our analysis offers three main insights. First, revenues raised through the bank levy are lower than expected, because of low tax rates and high thresholds for tax exemptions. Second, the bulk of the payments were contributed by large commercial banks and by the central institutions of savings banks and credit unions. Third, for the banks affected by the levy, we find evidence for a reduction in lending and higher deposit rates.

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect business loans? While there is widespread belief that the real costs of increased bank capital in terms of reduced loans could be substantial, there are good reasons to believe that the negative real sector implications need not be severe. In this paper, we take a long-run perspective by analyzing the link between the capitalization of the banking sector and bank loans using panel cointegration models. We study the evolution of the German economy for the past 60 years. We find no evidence for a negative impact of bank capital on business loans. -- Bank capital ; Business loans ; Cointegration

There is growing consensus that the conduct of monetary policy can have an impact on financial and economic stability through the risk-taking incentives of banks. Falling interest rates might induce a 'search for yield' and generate incentives to invest into risky activities. This paper provides evidence on the link between monetary policy and commercial property prices and the risk-taking incentives of banks. We use a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) for the U.S. for the years 1997-2008. We include standard macroeconomic indicators and factors summarizing information provided in the Federal Reserve's Survey of Terms of Business Lending. These data allow modeling the reactions of banks' new lending volumes and the riskiness of new loans. We do not find evidence for a risk-taking channel for the entire banking system after a monetary policy loosening or an unexpected increase in property prices. This masks, however, important differences across banking groups. Small domestic banks increase their exposure to risk, foreign banks lower risk, and large domestic banks do not change their risk exposure

The World Financial Crisis has shaken the fundamentals of international banking and triggered a downward spiral of asset prices. To prevent a further meltdown of markets, governments have intervened massively through rescues measures aimed at recapitalizing banks and through liquidity support. We use a detailed, banklevel dataset for German banks to analyze how the lending and borrowing of their foreign affiliates has responded to domestic (German) and to US crisis support schemes. We analyze how these policy interventions have spilled over into foreign markets. We identify loan supply shocks by exploiting that not all banks have received policy support and that the timing of receiving support measures has differed across banks. We find that banks covered by rescue measures of the German government have increased their foreign activities after these policy interventions, but they have not expanded relative to banks not receiving support. Banks claiming liquidity support under tdd Term A5ction Facility (TAF) pr0ggram have withdrawn from foreign markets outside the US, but they have expanded relative to affiliates of other German ban

The interplay between banks and the macroeconomy is of key importance for financial and economic stability. We analyze this link using a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) which extends a standard VAR for the U.S. macroeconomy. The model includes GDP growth, inflation, the Federal Funds rate, house price inflation, and a set of factors summarizing conditions in the banking sector. We use data of more than 1,500 commercial banks from the U.S. call reports to address the following questions. How are macroeconomic shocks transmitted to bank risk and other banking variables? What are the sources of bank heterogeneity, and what explains differences in individual banks' responses to macroeconomic shocks? Our paper has two main findings: (i) Average bank risk declines, and average bank lending increases following expansionary shocks. (ii) The heterogeneity of banks is characterized by idiosyncratic shocks and the asymmetric transmission of common shocks. Risk of about 1/3 of all banks rises in response to a monetary loosening. The lending response of small, illiquid, and domestic banks is relatively large, and risk of banks with a low degree of capitalization and a high exposure to real estate loans decreases relatively strongly after expansionary monetary policy shocks. Also, lending of larger banks increases less while risk of riskier and domestic banks reacts more in response to house price shocks.

Globalization may impose a double-burden on low-skilled workers. On the one hand, the relative supply of low-skilled labor increases. This suppresses wages of low-skilled workers and/or increases their unemployment rates. On the other hand, low-skilled workers typically face more limited access to financial markets than high-skilled workers. This limits their ability to smooth shocks to income intertemporally and to share risks across borders. Using cross-country, industry-level data for the years 1970 - 2004, we document how the volatility of hours worked and of wages of workers at different skill levels has changed over time. We develop a stylized theoretical model that is consistent with the empirical evidence, and we test the predictions of the model. Our results show that greater financial globalization and development increases the volatility of employment, and this effect is strongest for low-skilled workers. A higher share of low-skilled employment has a dampening impact.

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the past decades. Whether this "Great Moderationʺ can be found in firm level data as well remains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using a balanced panel dataset on German firms that covers 35 years (1971-2005) and about 1,500 firms per year. In contrast to earlier work using firm level data, we use the multifactor residual model proposed by Pesaran (2006) to isolate the idiosyncratic component of firms' real sales growth from macroeconomic developments. Our paper has three main findings. First, time trends in unconditional firm level and aggregated output volatility in Germany are similar. There has been a long-run downward trend, which was interrupted by the unification period. Second, the conditional, idiosyncratic firm level volatility does not exhibit a downward trend. If anything idiosyncratic volatility has been on a slow trend rise. Third, we find evidence of a positive link between growth and volatility at the firm level.

Does more FDI make the world a riskier place for workers? We analyze whether an increase in multinational firms' activities is associated with an increase in firm-level employment volatility. We use a firm-level dataset for Germany which allows us to distinguish between purely domestic firms, domestic multinationals, their foreign affiliates, and foreign firms that are active in Germany. We decompose the volatility of firms into their reaction and their exposure to aggregate developments. Generally, we find no above-average wage and output elasticities for multinational firms.

Globalization has affected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign activities are affected by business cycle developments. We aggregate the data by the sector of the reporting firm, the sector of the foreign affiliate, and the host country. Data are annual and cover the period 1989- 2002. We find that German outward FDI increases in response to positive cyclical developments abroad and in response to a depreciation of the domestic currency.