For centuries, Jews in Europe have specialized in financial services. At the same time, they have been the victims of historical antisemitism on the part of the Christian majority. We find that present-day financial development is lower in German counties where historical antisemitism was...

For centuries, Jews in Europe have specialized in financial services. At the same time, they have been the victims of historical antisemitism on the part of the Christian majority. We find that present-day financial development is lower in German counties where historical antisemitism was...

In this paper we introduce a new two-factor commodity term structure model for which inventories serve as a second state variable. We derive a closed-form formula for futures prices and empirically analyze the model's properties. Besides being economically appealing, our model also outperforms...

We investigate the impact of product market competition on firms' systematic risk. Using a measure of total product market similarity, we document a strong negative link between market power and market betas. There is a more than threefold increase in the effect during the most recent...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the degree of systemic risk in the U.S. banking sector versus other industry sectors. We characterize the systemic risk in each sector by the lower tail dependence of stock returns. Our study differs from extant literature in three respects. First, we...

In this article, we consider the pricing and hedging of single route dry bulk freight futures contracts traded on the International Maritime Exchange. Thus far, this relatively young market has received almost no academic attention. In contrast to many other commodity markets, freight services...

This paper reviews extant research on commodity price dynamics and commodity derivatives pricing models. In the first half, we provide an overview of stylized facts of commodity price behavior that have been explored and documented in the theoretical and empirical literature. In the second half,...

In this paper, we empirically explore risk premia in mortgage covered bond markets. Using a large panel data set of covered bond asset swap spreads, we study the impact of different legal and economic environments. Conducting an in-depth analysis of this market, we find significant but small...

We study the empirical performance of the classical minimum-variance hedging strategy, comparing several econometric models for estimating hedge ratios of crude oil, gasoline and heating oil crack spreads. Given the great variability and large jumps in both spot and futures prices, great care is...