Reint Gropp
Halle Institute for Economic Research
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Featured researches published by Reint Gropp.
Journal of Banking and Finance | 2002
Sandrine Corvoisier; Reint Gropp
The recent wave of mergers in the euro area raises the question, whether the increase in concentration has at least in part offset the increase in competition in European banking through deregulation. We test this question by estimating a simple Cournot model of bank pricing. We construct country and product specific measures of bank concentration and find that for loans and demand deposits, increasing concentration may have resulted in less competitive pricing by banks, whereas for savings and time deposits, the model is rejected, suggesting increases in contestability and/ or efficiency in these markets. These findings are robust across a wide variety of econometric specifications. Finally, the paper discusses some implications for tests of the effect of concentration on monetary policy transmission JEL Classification: L13, G21, B43
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking | 2006
Reint Gropp; Jukka M. Vesala; Giuseppe Vulpes
We analyse the ability of the distance-to-default and bond spreads to signal bank fragility. We show that both indicators are complete and unbiased and that spreads are non-linear in the probability of bank default. We empirically test these properties in a sample of EU banks. We find leading properties for both indicators. The distance-to-default exhibits lead times of 6 to 18 months. Spreads have signal value close to default only, in line with the theory. We also find that implicit safety nets weaken the predictive power of spreads. Further, the results suggest complementarity between both indicators, reducing type I errors. We also examine the interaction of the indicators with other bank information. JEL Classification: G21, G12
Review of Financial Studies | 2011
Reint Gropp; Hendrik Hakenes; Isabel Schnabel
This paper empirically investigates the effect of government bail-out policies on banks outside the safety net. We construct a measure of bail-out perceptions by using rating information. From there, we construct the market shares of insured competitor banks for any given bank, and analyze the impact of this variable on banks’ risk-taking behavior, using a large sample of banks from OECD countries. Our results suggest that government guarantees strongly increase the risk-taking of competitor banks. In contrast, there is no evidence that public guarantees increase the protected banks’ risk-taking, except for banks that have outright public ownership. These results have important implications for the effects of the recent wave of bank bail-outs on banks’ risk-taking behavior.
Quarterly Journal of Economics | 1997
Reint Gropp; John Karl Scholz; Michelle J. White
This paper examines how personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy exemptions affect the supply and demand for credit. While generous state-level bankruptcy exemptions are probably viewed by most policymakers as benefitting less-well-off borrowers, our results using data from the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances suggest they increase the amount of credit held by high-asset households and reduce the availability and amount of credit to low-asset households, conditioning on observable characteristics. We also find evidence that interest rates on automobile loans for low-asset households are higher in high exemption states. Thus, bankruptcy exemptions redistribute credit toward borrowers with high assets.
Quarterly Journal of Finance | 2014
Reint Gropp; Christoffer Kok; Jung-Duk Lichtenberger
This paper investigates the effect of within banking sector competition and competition from financial markets on the dynamics of the transmission from monetary policy rates to retail bank interest rates in the euro area. We use a new dataset that permits analysis for disaggregated bank products. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we test whether development of financial markets and financial innovation speed up the pass through. We find that more developed markets for equity and corporate bonds result in a faster pass-through for those retail bank products directly competing with these markets. More developed markets for securitized assets and for interest rate derivatives also speed up the transmission. Further, we find relatively strong effects of competition within the banking sector across two different measures of competition. Overall, the evidence supports the idea that developed financial markets and competitive banking systems increase the effectiveness of monetary policy.
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis | 2014
Zeno Adams; Roland Füss; Reint Gropp
In this paper, we develop a state-dependent sensitivity value-at-risk (SDSVaR) approach that enables us to quantify the direction, size, and duration of risk spillovers among financial institutions as a function of the state of financial markets (tranquil, normal, and volatile). Within a system of quantile regressions for four sets of major financial institutions (commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies) we show that while small during normal times, equivalent shocks lead to considerable spillover effects in volatile market periods. Commercial banks and, especially, hedge funds appear to play a major role in the transmission of shocks to other financial institutions. Using daily data, we can trace out the spillover effects over time in a set of impulse response functions and find that they reach their peak after 10 to 15 days.
International Tax and Public Finance | 2002
Reint Gropp
This paper investigates the question of taxation and capital structure choice in Germany. Germany represents an excellent case study for investigating the question of whether and to what extent taxes influence the debt-equity decision of firms, because the relative tax burdens on debt and equity vary greatly across communities. German communities levy local taxes on profits and long-term debt payments in addition to personal and corporate taxes on the federal level. A stylized model is presented incorporating these taxes. The model shows that local taxes create substantial incentives for firms to use debt financing. Furthermore, the paper empirically investigates the effect of local business taxes on the share of debt used to finance incremental investments by German firms. I find that local taxes significantly influence the capital structure choice of firms, controlling for a large number of other factors. In an extensive sensitivity analysis the tax effect are found to be robust across several different specifications.
Archive | 2010
Reint Gropp; Matthias Köhler
In this paper, we analyse whether bank owners or bank managers were the driving force behind the risks incurred in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We show that owner controlled banks had higher profits in the years before the crisis, and incurred larger losses and were more likely to require government assistance during the crisis compared to manager-controlled banks. The results are robust to controlling for a wide variety of bank specific, country specific, regulatory and legal variables. Regulation does not seem to mitigate risk taking by bank owners. We find no evidence that profit smoothing drives our findings. The results suggest that privately optimal contracts aligning the incentives of management and shareholders may not be socially optimal in banks.
Social Science Research Network | 2001
Reint Gropp; Sandrine Corvoisier
We estimate the effect of internet penetration on retail bank margins in the euro area. Based on an adapted Baumol [1982] type contestability model, we argue that the internet has reduced sunk costs and therefore increased contestability in retail banking. We test this conjecture by estimating the model using semi-aggregated data for a panel of euro area countries. We utilise time series and cross-sectional variation in internet penetration. We find support for an increase in contestability in deposit markets, and no effect for loan markets. The paper suggests that for time and savings deposits, the presence of brick and mortar bank branches may no longer be of first order importance for the assessment of the competitive structure of the market.
Review of Finance | 2013
Frédéric Boissay; Reint Gropp
Using a unique data set on trade credit defaults among French firms, we investigate whether and how trade credit is used to relax financial constraints. We show that firms that face idiosyncratic liquidity shocks are more likely to default on trade credit, especially when the shocks are unexpected, firms have little liquidity, are likely to be credit constrained or are close to their debt capacity. We estimate that credit constrained firms pass more than one fourth of the liquidity shocks they face on to their suppliers down the trade credit chain. The evidence is consistent with the idea that firms provide liquidity insurance to each other and that this mechanism is able to alleviate the consequences of credit constraints. In addition, we show that the chain of defaults stops when it reaches firms that are large, liquid, and have access to financial markets. This suggests that liquidity is allocated from large firms with access to outside finance to small, credit constrained firms through trade credit chains. JEL Classification: G30, D92, G20