With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

Economic growth in Africa has long been disappointing. We document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We examine the factors that are associated with financial development in Africa...

We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was higher and - contrary to expectations - access to...

Rational investors perceive correctly the value of financial information. Investment in information is therefore rewarded with a higher Sharpe ratio. Overcon.dent investors overstate the quality of their own information, and thus attain a lower Sharpe ratio. We contrast the implications of the...

In this paper we focus on poor financial literacy as one potential factor explaining lack of portfolio diversification. We use the 2007 Unicredit Customers' Survey, which has indicators of portfolio choice, financial literacy and many demographic characteristics of investors. We first propose...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms’ assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...

Recent economic developments have shown the importance of spillover and contagion effects in financial markets. Such effects are not limited to relations between the levels of financial variables but also impact on their volatility. I investigate Granger causality in conditional mean and...

Spillover and contagion effects have gained significant interest in the recent years of financial crisis. Attention has not only been directed to relations between returns of financial variables, but to spillovers in risk as well. I use the family of Constant Conditional Correlation GARCH models...

Multivariate simultaneous equations models were used extensively for macroeconometric analysis when Sims (1980) advocated vector autoregressive (VAR) models as alternatives. At that time longer and more frequently observed macroeconomic time series called for models which described the dynamic...

Recent economic developments have shown the importance of spillover and contagion effects in financial markets as well as in macroeconomic reality. Such effects are not limited to relations between the levels of variables but also impact on the volatility and the distributions. We propose a...