In this course, students learn about important papers in empirical banking and financial intermediation. The course touches on macrofinance and corporate finance topics as well. Students are expected to read and present several papers in class (60% of the grade) and provide overviews over related papers covered in the lecture (40% of the grade).

The course is split into 6 lectures which will cover the following areas (papers):

1. Finance + Growth: Cross country studies (King & Levine (1993), LaPorta et al (1998))
2. Relationship lending (Petersen & Rajan (1994),  Berger & Udell (1995))
3. Loan Demand or Loan Supply? The advantages of  loan level data (Khwaja & Mian (2005 /2008), Puri, Rocholl, Steffen (2011))
4. Global Financial Cycle, Bubbles and Systemic Risk: Macrofinance (Schularick & Taylor (2012), Acharya et al. (2016), Adrian & Brunnermeier (2016))
5. Modern banking: identification & story telling (Huber (2018), Gilje, Loutskina & Strahan (2016))
6. Networks & Social Connectedness  (Bailey et al. (2018), Haselmann et al. (2018))

Students are made familiar with the development of the empirical banking and financial intermediation literature of the past three decades. They will learn why certain papers became influential in certain times. They will also be encouraged to learn how to conduct a literature search in their own areas of interest and learn how to relate papers in the literature.

100%

The course requires detailed reading of all papers that students are presenting. The students are also expected to understand the main message, identification strategy and problems with all papers on the final reading list, although this does not necessarily mean all papers have to be read in detail. Students are also expected to acquire an understanding of the related literature beyond the papers covered on the syllabus.

The assessment is based on the presentation of the paper (60%) and a summary of the literature in writing (exact format TBD) (40%). Active participation is expected and rewarded with Bonus points (+10%).

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