This paper examines the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle of international capital flows referring to a panel data set of EMU countries and major industrialized and emerging economies. Overall, the results do not provide evidence in favour of the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle....

This paper examines the international credit portfolios of German banks. We construct a bank-country panel from a unique dataset for a representative set of countries and ask why banks leave diversification opportunities unexploited in some countries. Controlling for bank heterogeneity, we...

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...

This paper sheds new light on herding of institutional investors by using a unique database that identifies every transaction made by financial institutions in the German stock market. First, the analysis reveals that herding behavior of institutions occurs daily. Second, replication of the...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

This paper provides initial evidence on counterparty risk-mitigation activities of financial institutions on the basis of Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) proprietary bilateral credit default swap transactions and positions. We show that financial institutions that are active...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross-section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

Japan's economy is expanding and expected to continue expanding moderately, according to Monthly Report of Recent Economic and Financial Developments released by the Bank of Japan in July 2007.The BOJ declared the change of policy stance at the Monetary Policy Meeting held on July 14, 2006. The...

This paper presents a non-technical overview of the recent investment literature with a special emphasis on the connection between technological progress and the investment decision. First of all, we acknowledge that some dramatic advances have been made in the 1990s in understanding and...