Excessive sovereign debt exposures of banks contributed to the gravity of the financial and sovereign debt crisis in 2011 and 2012, as well as to the slow and asymmetric recovery of European countries. Various policies that improve banks' resilience were introduced in recent years, however the...

European banks are exposed to a substantial amount of risky sovereign debt. The “missing bank capital” resulting from the zero-risk weight exemption for European banks for European sovereign debt amplifies the co-movement between sovereign CDS spreads and facilitates cross-border...

More than 80% of US syndicated loans contain at least one fee type and contracts typically specify a menu of spread and different types of fees. We test the predictions of existing theories about the main purposes of fees and provide supporting evidence that: (1) fees are used to price options...

We show that compensation and other manager characteristics that attract public scrutiny in the banking industry only describe a small amount of the heterogeneity in the business models of banks. Instead, idiosyncratic manager effects that cannot be explained by observable manager...

Consistent with theoretical predictions, we show that investors incorporate expected joint liquidation costs in their portfolio decisions. Using detailed security-level holdings of U.S. Money Market Mutual Funds (MMFs), we construct a new measure of portfolio similarity among investors and show...

We document a 24% decline in loan issuances in the UK syndicated loan market after theBrexit vote relative to a set of comparable loan markets. The decline in lending is driven bya pervasive reduction in demand by UK firms. Changes in GDP forecast around the Brexitvote explain about 61% of the...

We analyze the three main exit routes for exiting buyout investments, initial public offerings (IPO), sales and write-offs on, using a unique data set for US and European buyout transactions for the 1990 to 2005 period. We examine the determinants influencing the choice of an exit channel...

In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for information rents in loan spreads by analyzing a sample of UK syndicated loan contracts for the period from 1996 to 2005. We use various measures for borrower opaqueness and control for bank, borrower and loan characteristics and we find that...