This paper aims at analysing the mortality patterns of hedge funds over the period January 1994 to May 2008. In particular, we investigate the extent to which a spillover of risk among hedge funds through redemptions and failures of other funds has affected the probability of fund failure. We...

Exchanges and other trading platforms are often vertically integrated to carry out trading, clearing and settlement as one operation. We show that such vertical silos can prevent efficiency gains from horizontal consolidation of trading and settlement platforms to be realized. Independent of the...

The competition between a central securities depository (CSD) and a custodian bank is analysed in a Stackelberg model. The CSD sets its prices first, the custodian bank follows. There are many investor banks each of which has to decide whether to use the service of the CSD or of the custodian...

This paper compares securities settlement gross and netting architectures. It studies settlement risk arising from exogenous operational delays and compares settlement failures between the two architectures as functions of the length of the settlement interval under different market conditions....

This paper investigates the impact on the network growth of the level of merchant discount, the level of Multilateral Interchange Fee (MIF), and the consumers' and the merchants' awareness of positive network effects. In an artificial market, in which issuers and acquirers belong to the same...

The harmonisation of fiscal and economic policy within the European Monetary Union (EMU) has had a considerable impact on the economies of member countries in the past decade. In particular, several studies indicate that the proceeding economic integration among euro area countries has important...

This paper takes a close look at the 'behavioural finance' explanations of the equity premium puzzle, namely myopic loss aversion (Benartzi and Thaler, 1995) and disappointment aversion (Ang, Bekaert and Liu, 2000). The paper proposes a simple specification of loss and disappointment aversion...

We study how financial market efficiency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

During the last decade, markets for covered warrants (bank-issued options) have flourished in Europe and Asia. In these markets, investors often face a choice between many instruments that differ only slightly from each other. Based on retail trades in call options on the German DAX index, this...