We present a model of an economy with heterogeneous banks that may be funded with uninsured deposits and equity capital. Capital serves to ameliorate a moral hazard problem in the choice of risk. There is a fixed aggregate supply of bank capital, so the cost of capital is endogenous. A regulator...

‘Safe harbour’ is shorthand for a bundle of privileges in insolvency which are typically afforded to financial institutions. They are remotely comparable to security interests as they provide a financial institution with a considerably better position as compared to other creditors should...

This paper contains a general equilibrium model of an economy with incomplete markets (GEI) with money and default. The model is a simplified version of the real world consisting of a non-bank private sector, banks, a central bank, a government and a regulator. The model is used to analyse...

Recovery rates are negatively related to default probabilities (Altman et al., 2005). This paper proposes and estimates a model in which this dependence is the result of an unobserved credit cycle: When times are bad, the default probability is high and recovery rates are low; when times are...

We examine whether the information contained in social media (Twitter & Facebook) and web search queries (Google) influences financial markets. Using a multivariate system and focussing on Eurozone’s peripheral countries, the GIIPS (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), we show that...

This paper reveals the underlying market’s preferences over the on going Euro area sovereign debt crisis. It builds on a loss function with reference to the ‘basis’, the difference between the spread over swap and Credit Default Swap (CDS) for sovereign bonds. This loss function is general...

Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a welldefined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...

In this paper, we show that ownership structures vary considerably across Europe, and that the dominant form of ownership is not necessarily the most efficient one. These findings are in contradiction to similar research based on US samples. The results also demonstrate that firms without a...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...