This paper analyses the impact of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) on global financial markets. It presents back-of-the-envelope calculations which simulate the potential impact of a transfer of traditional foreign exchange reserves to SWFs on global capital flows. If SWFs behave as CAPM-type...

This paper describes sovereign credit ratings in emerging markets both for a specific year and over time, using quantitative explanatory variables. It turns out that rating adjustments have been worse than what economic fundamentals justify for some countries and also more frequently altered,...

In this paper we want to discuss macroscopic and microscopic properties of financial markets. By analyzing quantitatively a database consisting of 13 minute per minute recorded financial time series, we identify some macroscopic statistical properties of the corresponding markets, with a special...

The recent corporate failures in the US and in Europe have considerably damaged investors’ confidence in the functioning of financial markets and the ability of the regulatory framework to safeguard their interest and prevent fraud. These episodes demonstrate that market failures exist, which...