This paper uses the co-incidence of extreme shocks to banks’ risk to examine within country and across country contagion among large EU banks. Banks’ risk is measured by the first difference of weekly distances to default and abnormal returns. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the paper...

In this paper we assess the importance given in capital markets to the credibility of the European fiscal framework. We evaluate to which extent relevant fiscal policy events taking place in the course of 2002 produced a reaction in the long-term bond segment of the capital markets. Firstly, we...

This paper considers the role of foreign investors in developed-country equity markets. It presents a quantitative model of trading that is built around two new assumptions: (i) both the foreign and domestic investor populations contain investors of different sophistication, and (ii) investor...

The paper proposes a multi-factor international asset pricing model in which the exchange rate is allowed to be co-determined by a risk factor imperfectly correlated to other priced risks in the economy. The significance of this factor can be established as long as one is able to observe a proxy...

This paper assesses the contemporaneous, leading and lagging indicator properties of financial market variables relative to movements in six major developed country currency pairs. As indicator variables changes in various relative asset prices, short-term portfolio flows and currency options...

We study sovereign yield dynamics and order flow in the largest euro-area treasury markets. We exploit unique transaction data to explain daily yield changes in the ten-year government bonds of Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany. We use a state space model to decompose these changes into (i) a...

This paper addresses a very European issue, the consolidation of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. In a two-country model, we analyze welfare implications of different types of consolidation. We find that horizontal integration of settlement systems is better than vertical...

In this paper, we investigate the determinants of the Euro term structure of credit spreads. More specifically, we analyze whether the sensitivity of credit spread changes to financial and macroeconomic variables depends on bond characteristics such as rating and maturity. According to the...

We propose a simple structural model of exchange rate determination which draws from the analytical framework recently proposed by Bacchetta and van Wincoop (2003) and allows us to disentangle the liquidity and information effects of order flow on exchange rates. We estimate this model employing...

This paper uses data on currency options prices for the exchange rates of the three largest new EU member states Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary vis-à-vis the euro and the US dollar to estimate the risk-neutral density (RND) functions and the density interval bands. Analysing the RNDs, we...