We model a banker's future bonuses as a series of call options on the bank's profits and show that bonus caps and deferrals reduce risk-taking. However, the banker's optimal risk-taking also depends on the costs of risk-taking. We calibrate the model to US banking data and show that lengthening...

We model banks’ loan losses with a panel of European countries for the period 1982–2012 using three country-specific macro variables: output growth shocks, real interest rates, and a measure of excessive private sector indebtedness. We find that a drop in output has an intensified impact on...

We investigate the relationship between the daily average interbank overnight borrowing rate (AOR) and the credit default swap price (CDS) of 60 banks using the Eurosystem’s proprietary data from mid-2008 to mid-2013. We find that the AOR which is observable only by the competent Eurosystem...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivation for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II’s procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Basel II on the efficiency of bank lending....

The aim of the Internal Ratings Based Approach (IRBA) of Basel II was that capital suffices for unexpected losses with at least a 99.9% probability. However, because only a fraction of the required regulatory capital (a quarter to a half) had to be loss absorbing capital, the actual solvency...

We consider the problem of dynamically hedging a fixed portfolio of assets in the presence of non-linear instruments and transaction costs, as well as constraints on feasible hedging positions. We assume an investor maximizing the expected utility of his terminal wealth over a finite holding...

This paper considers arbitrage-free option pricing in the presence of large agents. These large agents have a significant market power, and their trading strategies influence the dynamics of the financial asset prices. First, a simple asset pricing model in the presence of large agents is...

The timing of elections is flexible in many countries. We study this optimization by first creating a Bayesian learning model of a mean-reverting political support process. We then explore optimal electoral timing, modelling it as a renewable American option with interacting waiting and stopping...

In this paper we consider the pricing of point-to-point bandwidth leasing contracts and options. The underlying asset of these contracts is a point-to-point telecommunications connection. Due to the network structure the network capacity prices depend nonlinearly on each other. A leasing...

Using a two-stage least squares model, we build a macroeconomic model of supply and demand for US higher education as measured by enrollment. We find that college education benefits (e.g. relative earnings and employment level), credit factors (e.g. student loan amounts and household debt), and...