As most Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) engage in securities lending or are based on total return swaps, they expose their investors to counterparty risk. To mitigate the funds' exposure, their counterparties must pledge collateral. In this paper, the authors present a framework to study collateral...

In this study we re-examine the pricing of equity and the risk incentives of shareholders in levered firms. We derive a down-and-out call equity valuation model which rests on the assumption that shareholders choose the optimal investment and asset returns' volatility as a function of current...

By focusing on the highly innovative retail market for structured products, we investigate the drivers of financial complexity. We perform a lexicographic analysis of the term sheets of 55,000 retail structured products issued in Europe since 2002. We observe that financial complexity has been...

In this paper, we use the investment fraud of Bernard Madoff to inquire into the production of trust in the context of financial markets. Drawing upon empirical data related to U.S. individual investors (interviews and letters) as well as documentary material, we investigate the mechanisms...

In this paper, the authors introduce a form of pre-play communication that we call "preopening". During the preopening, players announce their tentative actions to be played in the underlying game. Announcements are made using a posting system which is subject to stochastic failures. Posted...

This paper provides a survey of recent changes in the market microstructure of the 5 largest European Stock Exchanges. We first provide a brief statistical overview of European equity markets. Then we discuss how the introduction of the Investment Services Directive and the development of...

We consider information sharing between traders("floor brokers") who possess different types of information, namely information on the payoff of a risky security or information on the volume of liquidity trading in this security. We interpret these traders as dual -capacity brokers on the floor...

We analyze the effect of concealing limit order traders’ identities on market liquidity. We develop a model in which limit order traders have asymmetric information on the cost of limit order trading (which is determined by the exposure to informed trading). A thin limit order book signals to...

Existing theories of the term structure of swap rates provide an analysis of the Treasury-swap spread based on either a liquidity convenience yield in the Treasury market, or default risk in the swap market. While these models do not focus on the relation between corporate yields and swap rates...

We develop a dynamic model of an order-driven market populated by discretionary liquidity traders. These traders must trade, yet can choose the type of order and are fully strategic in their decision. Traders differ by their impatience: less patient traders demand liquidity, more patient traders...