To extend and monitor loans, banks collect detailed and proprietary information about the financial prospects of their customers, many of whom are local businesses and households. Therefore, banks’ loan portfolios contain potentially useful information about local economic conditions. We...

We study which factors in terms of trading environment and trader characteristics determine individual information acquisition in experimental asset markets. Traders with larger endowments, existing inconclusive information, lower risk aversion, and less experience in financial markets tend to...

The ad hoc Black-Scholes (AHBS) model is one of the most widely used option valuation models among practitioners models. The main contribution of this study is methodological. We have two main results: (1) we make the empirical observation that typically the call and put sneers are discontinuous...

In this article, we provide an alternative evidence of asymmetric information in automobile insurance based on a copula model. We use the Frank’s copula to jointly model the type of policy coverage chosen and the number of accidents, with the dependence parameter providing for evidence of the...

This paper investigates the role of bank credit in predicting U.S. recessions since the 1960s in the context of a bivariate probit model. A set of results emerge. First, credit booms are shown to have strong positive effects in predicting declines in the business cycle at horizons ranging from...