This paper examines how the category of failure was economised and made calculable. It explores the preconditions for this shift in three stages. First, it explores how failure came to be ‘forgiven’ in both the U.S. and the U.K. across the nineteenth century, how it came to be defined as...

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...

What makes futures hedge funds fail? The common ingredient is over betting and not being diversified in some bad scenarios that can lead to disaster. Once troubles arise, it is difficult to take the necessary actions that eliminate the problem. Moreover, many hedge fund operators tend not to...

This paper examines the concept of systemic risk and provides an intuitive account of the economic thought on systems and the development of the notion of systemic risk. It is illustrated by putting the ideas of system, systemic risk and endogenous risk in a historial perspective.

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...

This paper focuses on the impact of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) and of their regulation on the post-crisis transformation of securities and derivatives markets. It examines, in particular, the role that trading and post-trading FMIs, and their new regulatory regime, are playing in...

The financial crisis has generated a deep revision of the regulation of securities and derivatives markets. In this paper, we critically examine the extent to which current reforms, such as the European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the proposed new Markets in Financial Instruments...