We employ a representative sample of 80,972 Italian firms to forecast the drop in profits and the equity shortfall triggered by the COVID-19 lockdown. A 3-month lockdown generates an aggregate yearly drop in profits of about 10% of GDP, and 17% of sample firms, which employ 8.8% of the sample's...

Do competition and incentives offered to designated market makers (DMMs) improve market liquidity? Using data from the NYSE Euronext Paris, we show that an exogenous increase in competition among DMMs leads to a significant decrease in quoted and effective spreads, mainly through a reduction in...

With the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, banks face a challenging environment. They will need to address disappointing results and adverse balance sheet restatements, the intensity of which depends on the evolution of the euro area economies. At the same time, vulnerable...

We analyze how informed investors trade in the options market ahead of corporate news when they receive private, but noisy, information about the timing and impact of these announcements on stock prices. We propose a framework that ranks options trading strategies (option type, maturity, and...

We study the impact of transparency on liquidity in OTC markets. We do so by providing an analysis of liquidity in a corporate bond market without trade transparency (Germany), and comparing our findings to a market with full posttrade disclosure (the U.S.). We employ a unique regulatory dataset...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

We characterize how informed investors trade in the options market ahead of corporate news when they receive private, but noisy, information about (i) the timing of the announcement and (ii) its impact on stock prices. Our theoretical framework generates a rich set of predictions about the...