We study a model where some investors ("hedgers") are bad at information processing, while others ("speculators") have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading,...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. We show that in order to minimize the risk and the cost of arbitrage an investor who identifies several mispriced assets optimally advertises only one of...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability...

This paper distils three lessons for bank regulation from the experience of the 2009-12 euro-area financial crisis. First, it highlights the key role that sovereign debt exposures of banks have played in the feedback loop between bank and fiscal distress, and inquires how the regulation of...

This paper analyzes the risk properties of typical asset-backed securities (ABS), like CDOs or MBS, relying on a model with both macroeconomic and idiosyncratic components. The examined properties include expected loss, loss given default, and macro factor dependencies. Using a two-dimensional...

While much of classical statistical analysis is based on Gaussian distributional assumptions, statistical modeling with the Laplace distribution has gained importance in many applied fields. This phenomenon is rooted in the fact that, like the Gaussian, the Laplace distribution has many...

One of the leading methods of estimating the structural parameters of DSGE mod- els is the VAR-based impulse response matching estimator. The existing asympotic theory for this estimator does not cover situations in which the number of impulse response parameters exceeds the number of VAR model...

The German financial system is the archetype of a bank-dominated system. This implies that organized equity markets are, in some sense, underdeveloped. The purpose of this paper is, first, to describe the German equity markets and, second, to analyze whether it is underdeveloped in any...