The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

In this paper we consider various privatisation mechanisms in a general equilibrium model. We show that privatisation has no real effects, if the public sector is efficient and lump-sum taxes are implemented. The free distribution of public assets is financially neutral, whereas the sale of...

This paper evaluates the predictability of WTI light sweet crude oil futures by using the variance risk premium, i.e. the difference between model-free measures of implied and realized volatilities. Additional regressors known for their ability to explain crude oil futures prices are also...

In this paper I have used copula functions to forecast the Value-at-Risk (VaR) of an equally weighted portfolio comprising a small cap stock index and a large cap stock index for the oil and gas industry. The following empirical questions have been analyzed: (i) are there nonnormalities in the...

The U.S. system of security law was designed more than 70 years ago to regain investors' trust after a major financial crisis. Today we face a similar problem. But while in the 1930s the prevailing perception was that investors had been defrauded by offerings of dubious quality securities, in...

This paper investigates the relationship between energy prices and the real effective exchange rate of commodity-exporting countries. We consider two sets of countries: 10 energy-exporting and 23 non-fuel commodity-exporting countries over the period 1980-2011. Estimating a panel cointegrating...