Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

Using a newly-constructed data set on Israeli Initial Public Offering (IPO) firms in the 1990s, we study costs and benefits of universal banking. We find that a firm whose equity was underwritten by a bank-affiliated underwriter, when the same bank was also a large creditor of the firm in the...

This paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks in Europe and the United States by the three largest rating agencies over the past two decades. We interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness, and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on...

We economically motivate and then test a range of hypotheses regarding performance and risk differences between UCITS-compliant and other hedge funds. The latter exhibit more suspicious return patterns than do absolute return UCITS (ARUs), but ARUs exhibit higher levels of operational risk. We...

The traditional theory of commercial banking explains maturity transformation and liquidity provision assuming no asymmetric information and no excess profits. It captures the possibility of bank runs and business cycle risk; but it ignores the moral hazard problems connected with risk-taking by...

We analyze the interaction between financial institutions' internal compensation policy, the quality of loans, and their securitization decision. We also assess the case for requiring financial institutions to defer bonus pay so as to make incentives more commensurate with the longer-term risk...

This paper examines whether multinational banks have a stabilising or a destabilising role during times of financial distress. With a focus on Europe, it looks at how these banks’ foreign affiliates have been faring during the recent financial crisis. It finds that retail and corporate lending...