Using a novel proxy of investors’ speculative demand constructed from online search interest in “concept stocks”, we examine how speculative demand affects the returns and trading volume of Chinese stock indices. We find that returns and trading volume increase with the contemporaneous...

This paper studies the extent to which market crashes are predictable for a set of six countries, focusing in particular on possible differences between transition economies (The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and mature markets (UK, US and EU). We estimate a set of individual country and...

We present a model of risky debt in which collateral value is correlated with the possibility of default. The model is then used to study: 1) the expected amount of debt recovered in the event of default as a function of collateral; and 2) the amount of collateral needed to mitigate the...

Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the ‘Big Five’ crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivator for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II’s procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of capital requirements on the allocation of...

Basel II framework requires banks to conduct stress tests on their potential future minimum capital requirements and consider ‘at least the effect of mild recession scenarios’. We propose a stress testing framework for minimum capital requirements in which banks’ corporate credit risks are...