Earlier research has shown that euro-area primary public debt markets affect secondary markets. We find that more successful auctions of euro area public debt, as captured by higher bid-to-cover ratios, lead to lower secondary-market yields following the auctions. This effect is stronger when...

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...

We study empirically how competition among high-frequency traders (HFTs) affects their trading behavior and market quality. Our analysis exploits a unique dataset, which allows us to compare environments with and without high-frequency competition, and contains an exogenous event - a tick size...

I develop and test a model explaining the gradual price decrease observed in the days leading up to anticipated asset sales such as Treasury auctions. In the model, risk-averse investors expect an uncertain increase in the net supply of a risky asset. They face a trade-off between hedging the...

Earlier research has shown that euro-area primary public debt markets affect secondary markets. We find that more successful auctions of euro area public debt, as captured by higher bid-to-cover ratios, lead to lower secondary-market yields following the auctions. This effect is stronger when...

We study the effects on the stock market of a securities transaction tax (STT). In particular, we focus on the recent introduction of a STT in Italy. Indeed, a peculiarity of the Italian STT is that it only concerns stocks of corporations with a market capitalization above 500 million euros. We...

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

Using the 2007-2009 financial crisis as a laboratory, we analyze the transmission of crises to country-industry equity portfolios in 55 countries. We use an asset pricing framework with global and local factors to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings as...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

This paper studies how peers' financial behaviour affects individuals' own investment choices. To identify the peer effect, we exploit the unique composition of the Luxembourg population and use the differences in stock market participation across various immigrant groups to study how they...