This paper explores the reasons why an increasing number of firms in continental Europe are unifying their shares into a single class, and analyzes the consequences of this restructuring. Interestingly, recent changes in corporate governance environment have created a situation when the reasons...

After the Lehman default, but also during the euro area sovereign debt crisis, central banks have tended to extend the ability of banks to take recourse to central bank credit operations through changes of the collateral framework (e.g. CGFS, 2008 – in consistence with previous narratives,...

The paper investigates small business lending as an information problem. It models the effects of information asymmetries within the bank combined with fixed wages. Two kinds of inefficiencies arise in equilibrium: the credit officer either sometimes shirks or he is occasionally fired. In both...

Banks play a role in the corporate governance of firms as well as acting as debt financiers around the world. Universal banks can have control over borrowing firms by representation on the board of directors or by holding shares through direct stakes or institutional holdings. We investigate the...

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS), shares typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis,...

Global bonds are international securities designed to be traded and settled efficiently in multiple markets. This paper studies global bonds to examine the effects of multimarket trading on corporate bond liquidity, prices, and the cost of debt. Using a sample of primary and secondary market...

Overlapping portfolios constitute a well-recognised source of risk, providing a channel for financial contagion induced by the market price impact of asset deleveraging. We introduce a novel method to assess the market price impact on a security-by-security basis from historical daily traded...

One important source of systemic risk can arise from asset commonality among financial institutions. This indirect interconnection may occur when financial institutions invest in similar or correlated assets and it is also described as overlapping portfolios. In this paper, we propose a new...

I study the causal effect of bond investor demand on the financing and investment decisions of nonfinancial firms using granular data on the bond transactions of U.S. insurance companies. Liquidity inflows from insurance premiums combined with insurers' persistent investment preferences identify...

After the announcement of the European Central Bank's corporate quantitative easing program, non-financial corporations timed the bond market by shifting their issuance toward bonds eligible for the program. However, issuers of eligible bonds did not increase total issuance compared to other...