Bank holding companies (BHCs) invest in risky projects through bank entities or sell projects for a fee, thus engaging in shadow banking. BHCs can increase their fee income by guaranteeing sold projects with a recourse to the bank's balance sheet. When the expected guarantee repayments depend on...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

While financial liberalization has in general favorable effects, reforms in countries with poor regulation is often followed by financial crises. We explain this variation as the outcome of lobbying interests capturing the reform process. Even after liberalization, market investors must rely on...

We develop a model of endogenous lobby formation in which wealth inequalityand political accountability undermine entry and financial development. In-cumbents seek a low level of effective investor protection to prevent potentialentrants from raising capital. They succeed because they can...

This survey reviews how a recent political economy literature helps explaining variation in governance, competition, funding composition and access to credit. Evolution in political institutions can account for financial evolution, and appear critical to explain rapid changes in financial...

Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

This paper deals with the relation between excessive risk taking and capital structure in banks. Examining a quarterly dataset of U.S. banks between 1993 and 2010, we find that equity is valued higher when more risky portfolios are chosen when leverage is high, and that more risk taking has a...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds becauseof serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky et al. (2004) derive mean,variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Followingtheir lead, adjusted downside and global...

One of the fastest growing areas in empirical finance, and also one of the least rigorously analyzed, especially from a financial econometrics perspective, is the econometric analysis of financial derivatives, which are typically complicated and difficult to analyze. The purpose of this special...

We propose a simple network–based methodology for ranking systemically important financial institutions. We view the risks of firms –including both the financial sector and the real economy– as a network with nodes representing the volatility shocks. The metric for the connections of the...