Arnd Wiedemann

Risk Governance: Basic Rationale and Tentative Findings from the German Banking Sector

The fact that, over and over again, companies are surprised by unanticipated risks points to a serious deficit: Obviously, neither risk management nor corporate governance has been able to avert the incurred damage. Are these two highly specialized functions unable “to see the forest for the trees?” For the sake of overcoming the addressed limitations, the management theory-related search for a solution leads to the proposal of a bridging function: “risk governance”. We will first introduce its basic rationale in the corporate context before presenting tentative empirical findings from a benchmark study in the German banking sector. Our paper contributes to the development of a generic approach towards the strategic control of risk from the perspective of top management.

Persuasion of Individual Investors by Scenarios

Banks are often accused of biasing their information documents in order to exploit less sophisticated investors. In this paper we analyze the sales prospectus scenarios that banks create to describe their structured financial products to retail investors. Based on a broad data set of prospectuses in U.S. and German markets, we find that, contrary to previous studies of single products, most banks do not bias their scenarios to make their products appear better than they are. In the light of these results, the usefulness of stricter regulation of information documents is questionable.

Messung und Steuerung von Risiken im Rahmen des industriellen Treasury-Managements

Zu den Aufgaben eines Treasury-Managements zahlen das finanzielle Rentabilitatsmanagement und das finanzielle Risikomanagement einer Unternehmung. Das finanzielle Rentabilitatsmanagement beinhaltet das Management der Finanzstruktur, der Unternehmensrentabilitat, der Investitionen und der Kosten. Zum finanziellen Risikomanagement, dem in letzter Zeit steigende Bedeutung zukommt, gehoren das Management der Liquiditatsrisiken und das Management der Erfolgsrisiken. Abbildung 1 gibt einen Uberblick uber die Aufgaben des Treasury-Managements.