Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Chair of Banking and Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration), language: English, abstract: As the last global financial crisis has shown, macroeconomic shocks have huge impacts on numerous economic sectors. The distortions caused by the crisis led to world-wide declines in trade, output and employment. This paper takes special emphasis on bank leverage ratios. Our longitudinal sample ranges from 2004 to 2015, including 5,069 observations of 483 banks in the United States and Europe. Our investigations are based on a modified Gropp and Heider (2010) style linear two-way error component model that uses leverage determinants of non-financial firms to describe bank capital structure. It is investigated how bank capital structure and its determinants respond to the financial crisis. The results show that the financial crisis had strong impacts.
