We study whether a pre-existing link between bank and sovereign credit risk biased euro area banks' sovereign debt portfolio choices during 2011Q4 and 2012Q1 - a period of exceptional increases in their domestic sovereign bond holdings. We find that banks whose creditworthiness is linked to that...

Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

We use a unique dataset with bank clients' security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth shocks,...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between banks and sovereigns.But policymakers disagree on how to treat sovereign exposures in bank regulation. Our contributionis to model endogenous sovereign portfolio reallocation by banks in response toregulatory reform. Simulations...

Taking the mean-variance portfolio model as a benchmark, we compute the optimally diversified portfolio for banks located in France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. under different assumptions about currency hedging. We compare these optimal portfolios to the actual cross-border assets of banks...

This paper aims at analysing the mortality patterns of hedge funds over the period January 1994 to May 2008. In particular, we investigate the extent to which a spillover of risk among hedge funds through redemptions and failures of other funds has affected the probability of fund failure. We...

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds' commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds' exposure to...

We study how financial market efficiency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

Based on a Financial Almost Ideal Demand System (FAIDS), this paper investigates the wealth structure of German households. The long-run wealth elasticities and interest rate elasticities were calculated using a unique new quarterly financial accounts macro data set which covers the period from...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...