Investors traditionally rely on credit ratings to price debt instruments. However, rating agencies are known to be prudent in their approach to rating revisions, which results in delayed ratings adjustments to mutating credit conditions. For a large set of eurobonds we derive credit spread...

While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up...

The rise of conglomerate banks and their interrelated balance sheets, pose new challenges to theories of financial regulation. We measure the impact of recent legislative changes in Australia upon systemic risk, for banking and near banking sectors, and demonstrate a significant reduction post...

Equity hedge funds are thought to effectively operate market timing by implementing switching strategies conditional on market circumstances. In this paper we use only the reported monthly returns on a set of funds to infer the type of switching strategies they follow, if any, as well as their...

This study evaluates the efficiency of cross hedging with the new single stock futures (SSF) contracts recently introduced in the United States. We use matched sample estimation techniques to select SSF contracts that will reduce the basis risk of crossing hedging and will yield the most...

This research examines the perception that the AIM market is riskier than the Official List market in comparable stocks. The empirical analysis uses high frequency data for January 2000 to December 2004 on 533 AIM stocks and 264 comparable Official List stocks. Risk is measured in a variety of...

has long been known that English Cistercian monasteries often sold their wool in advance to foreign merchants in the late thirteenth century. The abbey of Pipewell in Northamptonshire features in a number of such contracts with Cahorsin merchants. This paper looks again at these contracts in the...

The assumption that the probability distribution of returns is independent of the current level of the asset price is an intuitive property for option pricing models on financial assets. This ‘scale invariance’ feature is common to the Black-Scholes (1973) model, most stochastic volatility...

The price-earnings effect has been a challenge to the idea of efficient markets for many years. The P/E used has always been the ratio of the current price to the previous year’s earnings. However, the P/E is partly determined by outside influences, such as the year in which it was measured,...

The price-earnings effect has been a challenge to the idea of efficient markets for many years. The P/E used has always been the ratio of the current price to the previous year’s earnings. However, the P/E is partly determined by outside influences, such as the year in which it was measured,...