This paper tests for conflicts of interest in the rating process of European asset- and mortgage-backed securities based on a new aggregation method for a deal's different tranche ratings. Controlling for a large set of determinants of credit risk, we find that credit rating agencies provide...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by either real short-term interest rates or Taylor rule residuals varied substantially across countries in the period from 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness...

This paper provides evidence for a causal effect of equity prices on corporate investment and employment. We use fire sales by distressed equity funds during the 2007-2009 financial crisis to identify substantial exogenous underpricing. Firms whose stocks are most underpriced have considerably...

The early stage of the recent financial crisis was marked by large value losses for bank stocks. This paper identifies the equity funds most affected by this valuation shock and examines its consequences for the non-financial stocks owned by the respective funds. We find that (i) ownership links...

The electronic trading system Xetra of the German Security Exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 451 large traders located in 23 different cities and 8 European countries. We explore informational asymmetries across the trader population: Traders located outside Germany...

Interdealer trading in the European sovereign bond market is characterized by low spreads and high liquidity. This paper examines whether the dealer-customer segment of the market also benefits from low spreads. Customers are smaller banks and buy-side financial institutions who request quotes...

We develop a framework to explore the asset pricing implications of simultaneous supply shocks in multiple assets in a setting with limits-to-arbitrage. The portfolio approach in Greenwood (2005) is generalized to allow for asymmetric information and therefore net positions of arbitrageurs...

This paper documents how currency speculators trade when international capital flows generate predictable exchange rate movements. The redefinition of the MSCI world equity index in December 2000 provides an ideal natural experiment identifying exogenous capital flows of index tracking equity...

Minimum price variation rules (tick size rules) in the French stock market prior to 1999 provide a natural experiment on the role of transaction costs for financial price volatility. For stock prices above French francs (FF) 500, the minimal tick size for quotes increases from FF 0.1 to FF 1....