The Lehman Brothers event in 2008 created a large uncertainty shock that triggered an economic slowdown lasting a decade. The macroeconomic effects are well documented, but the effect on business decisions much less so. In this paper, we explore corporate data to investigate how economic...

This paper studies the causal effects of personal investment taxes on stock demand, stock returns, and the financial decisions of companies. I exploit a change in legislation in 2013 which allowed stocks listed on the Alternative Investment Market, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, to...

Large deficits have opened up on defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom since 2007, and at the same time investment expenditure has been subdued; this is a common phenomenon in other countries too. We use privileged access to a unique new data set from The Pensions Regulator and two...

On implementation, IFRS 9 increases credit loss (impairment) charges and reduces after-tax profits of banks. This makes retained earnings and hence capital resources lower than what they would be under IAS 39. To maintain their capital ratios under IFRS 9, banks could elect to hold higher levels...

We model the evolution of stylised bank loan portfolios to assess the impact of IFRS 9 and US GAAP expected loss model (ECL) on the cyclicality of loan write-off losses, loan loss provisions (LLPs) and capital ratios of banks, relative to the incurred loss model of IAS 39. We focus on the...

The prices of derivatives contracts can be used to estimate ‘risk-neutral' probability density functions that give an indication of the weight investors place on different future prices of their underlying assets, were they risk-neutral. In the likely case that investors are risk-averse, this...

This paper proposes a novel approach to assessing volatility contagion across equity markets. I decompose the variance risk premia of three major stock indices into: crash and non-crash risk components and analyse their cross-market correlations. I find that crash-risk premia exhibit higher...

We model the joint risk-neutral distribution of the euro-sterling and the dollar-sterling exchange rates using option-implied marginal distributions that are connected via a copula function that satisfies the triangular no-arbitrage condition. We then derive a univariate distribution for a...

This paper examines the role of defined benefit company pensions in amplifying the effect of common shocks to companies' stock market valuations. It identifies and evaluates the significance of two channels of amplification: cross-holdings of equities in pension schemes, and leverage induced by...

The endogenous evolution of liquidity risk is a key driver of financial crises. This paper models liquidity feedbacks in a quantitative model of systemic risk. The model incorporates a number of channels important in the current financial crisis. As banks lose access to longer-term funding...