We study price pressures in stock prices-price deviations from fundamental value due to a risk-averse intermediary supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, twelve years of daily New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveal economically large price pressures. A...

How do markets spread risk when events are unknown or unknowable and where not anticipated in an insurance contract? While the policyholder can hold up the insurer for extra contractual payments, the continuing gains from trade on a single contract are often too small to yield useful coverage....

How do markets spread risk when events are unknown or unknowable and where not anticipated in an insurance contract? While the policyholder can "hold up" the insurer for extra contractual payments, the continuing gains from trade on a single contract are often too small to yield useful coverage....

Insurance contracts are often complex and difficult to verify outside the insurance relation. We show that standard one-period insurance policies with an upper limit and a deductible are the optimal incentive-compatible contracts in a competitive market with repeated interaction. Optimal group...

This paper investigates how an office-motivated incumbent can use transparency enhancement on public spending to signal his budgetary management ability and win re-election. We show that, when the incumbent faces a popular challenger, transparency policy can be an effective signaling device. A...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

This paper is a draft for the chapter German banks and banking structure of the forthcoming book The German financial system edited by J.P. Krahnen and R.H. Schmidt (Oxford University Press). As such, the paper starts out with a description of past and present structural features of the German...

We analyze the differential impact of domestic and foreign monetary policy on the local supply of bank credit in domestic and foreign currencies. We analyze a novel, supervisory dataset from Hungary that records all bank lending to firms including its currency denomination. Accounting for...

When liquidity plays an important role as in times of financial crisis, asset prices in some markets may reflect the amount of liquidity available in the market rather than the future earning power of the asset. Mark-to-market accounting is not a desirable way to assess the solvency of a...

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gradual evolution of the supervisory policy adopted by the Basle Committee for the regulatory treatment of asset securitisation. We carefully highlight the pathology of the new securitisation framework to facilitate a general understanding of...