Understanding interlinkages in a financial system is an integral part of the assessment of its stability. This paper employs an event study technique to assess the significance of interlinkages from the UK life insurance sector to the UK banking system in times of stress. The paper uses a...

We investigate the impact that the publication of the Bank of England's Financial Stability Report (FSR) has on the stock returns and credit default swap spreads of UK financial institutions. Examining a sample of 73 UK-listed banks and other financial institutions, we find that publication of...

We analyse the behaviour of credit default swaps (CDS) for a sample of firms and find support for the theoretical equivalence of CDS prices and credit spreads. When this is violated we suggest the CDS price can be viewed as an upper bound on the price of credit risk, while the spread provides a...

A key issue raised by the rapid growth of computerised algorithmic trading is how it responds in extreme situations. Using data on foreign exchange orders and transactions that includes identification of algorithmic trading, we find that this type of trading contributed to the deterioration of...

This paper uses regulator-provided transaction data to investigate how trading in dark pools affects intraday market quality on the limit order book of the primary exchange for members of the FTSE 100 index. Using trading patterns from execution algorithms as instrumental variables, I show that...

The Bund (10 year German Government Bond) futures contract is the most actively traded bond contract in Europe; it is traded in both London (LIFFE) and Frankfurt (DTB) on open outcry and electronic trading platforms respectively. In an attempt to reconcile the conflicting results of earlier...

Central banks' decisions are a function of forecasts of macroeconomic fundamentals. Because private sector forecasts are not bound to be equal to central banks' forecasts, what markets label as unexpected may or may not be unanticipated by the central bank. Monetary surprises can thus...

Using unique transactions data for individual high-frequency trading (HFT) firms in the UK equity market, we examine if the trading activity of individual HFT firms is contemporaneously and dynamically correlated with each other, and what impact this has on price efficiency. We find that HFT...

We use proprietary transactional data to examine the determinants of liquidity in the UK government bond (gilt) market, over a rich sample period that covers both the financial crisis of 2008–09 as well as the onset of the subsequent euro-zone sovereign debt crisis. During this period, gilt...

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada's Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of...