German banks tend to emphasize how satisfied their clients are with the financial advice they offer. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that this satisfaction may have little to do with the quality of the information exchange between clients and advisors but rather with substitute factors like the friendliness and appearance of the advisor. Applying the theoretical perspectives of New Institutionalism and Behavioural Finance we explain in this article why the coexistence of information and interest asymmetry between retail clients and advisors must lead to poor advice quality and why the market's self-healing powers and the actual regulatory framework fail in preventing that. We support our theoretical analysis with some empirical evidence from a recent study we conducted to test the factual quality of the advice German banks give in the retail banking area. The results obtained are very consistent with previous findings of a poor level of quality of the information exchange between client and advisor and predominantly confirm our theoretical conclusions. We finally offer some suggestions that might pave the way out of this dilemma.

This study provides a detailed analysis to regional office real estate markets in the United Kingdom. A vector error correction (VEC) approach is applied to a unique panel dataset that covers the time period from 1981 until 2004 and allows a disaggregation to the NUTS 2 level. Long-run equilibrium relationships and shortterm corrections among total returns and the key macroeconomic variables gross domestic product (GDP), total investment and unemployment are captured. Different samples are used to control for the special role of the London market and to alleviate potential bias due to differences in the number of properties within regions. The results leave little ground for assuming that the economic variables have no impact on total office returns. They rather provide evidence that there are relatively strong long-run relationships. The assumption is supported that the longrun relationships are causal and running from the economic variables to total return. Furthermore, there is evidence for short-term causal relationships between economic variables, in particular total investment, and total return, as well as for total returns adjusting to the long-term disparities resulting from changes in the variables. Consequently, the economic variables do not only seem to provide short-term information but also short-term immediate effects on the movements of total returns. The character of the long-term equilibrium and short-term corrections, however, is not identical across samples while London indeed seems special.

The currently observable flight of investors out of investment funds is counterintuitive even in a crisis situation, because they forego the benefits of the collective investment offered by the funds. In order to unveil the reasons for this development we analyze the internal governance structure of German investment funds from a principal-agent perspective. We find that investment companies face severe governance problems because they are agents to at least two groups of principals with potentially conflicting interests. One group of principals consists of the shareholders of the investment company itself, the other group of principals consists of the actual fund investors.

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