This paper provides an empirical analysis of the risk of trading revenues of U.S. commercial banks. We collect quarterly data on trading revenues, broken down by business line, as well as the Value at Risk-based market risk charge. The overall picture from these preliminary results is that there...

This is the first paper that directly tests the cost of transparency. More precisely, we examine whether a willingness to offer transparency to investors is beneficial or costly in terms of hedge fund returns. We measure a fund's willingness to offer transparency by whether it accepts managed...

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as "credit contagion." This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We examine the wealth effects of bankruptcy announcements on creditors...

This paper shows that studies of announcement effects of bond rating changes should take into account the initial rating. First, we provide theoretical support for different price effects as a non-linear function of the initial credit rating, using a structural, Merton-type model linking the...

This paper investigates information transfer effects of bond rating downgrades measured by equity abnormal returns for industry portfolios. Industry rivals can be subject to two opposing effects, the contagion effect and the competition effect. We find that the net effect is strongly dependent...

This study examines the information transfer effect of credit events across the industry, as captured in the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and stock markets. Positive correlations across CDS spreads imply dominant contagion effects, whereas negative correlations indicate competition effects. We...