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...

Current approaches to asset-liability management employ a sequence of distinct procedures to value liabilities and determine the asset allocation. First, a discount rate that is usually dic-tated by accounting standards is used to value liabilities. Second, the asset allocation is determined by...

Theory suggests that reputations, developed in repeated face-to-face interactions, allow nonanonymous, floor-based trading venues to attenuate adverse selection in the trading process. We identify instances when stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) experience a non-trivial...

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

This work investigates both theoretically and empirically how the behaviour of financial analysts is affected by competition, measured as the strength of coverage of a stock from other analysts. The interaction among analysts and investors is modelled as a dynamic cheap talk game. The...

Focusing on homogeneous beliefs, we can distinguish two commonly shared ideas that, i) the competition between informed traders destroys their trading profits, ii) trading with a noisy signal brings about a loss in the expected profits. So far, it has been proved in the latter framework, that...

Given the opportunity to buy IPO shares of uncertain value at a fixed price, potentially informed investors have an incentive to refuse to participate in offerings the underwriter happens to overprice. We show that an underwriter can efficiently resolve this problem by entering into a repeat...

A bank can efficiently underwrite individually difficult to value IPOs by offering them as a package deal to a stable coalition of investors (block-booking). Block-booking banks set offer prices to equalize downside risk across their offerings, not expected returns. Examining US IPOs over the...

We analyze the structure and evolution of the allocation of decision and control rights in venture capital contracts by using a sample of 464 contracts between venture capitalists (VC) and portfolio firms from Germany. We focus on the evolution of control and decisions rights along three time...

We examine the determinants of underwriter spreads on straight/fixed rate Eurobonds issued by U.S. firms between 1990 and 1998. We find that underwriter spreads are influenced by: (i) the governing law as it influences the timely and orderly renegotiation of contract terms, with bonds governed...