We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence...

We analyze the impact of funding costs and margin requirements on prices of index options traded on the CBOE. We propose a model that gives upper and lower bounds for option prices in the absence of arbitrage in an incomplete market with differential borrowing and lending rates. We show that...

Ending the dependence on rating agencies is a top priority for the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates the G20 financial policies. Rating agencies have been accused of contributing to the recent financial crisis by misjudging the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed securities. Their...

We investigate whether a bank’s performance during the 1998 crisis, which was viewed at the time as the most dramatic crisis since the Great Depression, predicts its performance during the recent financial crisis. One hypothesis is that a bank that has an especially poor experience in a crisis...

We present a careful analysis of possible issues of the application of the self-excited Hawkes process to high-frequency financial data and carefully analyze a set of effects that lead to significant biases in the estimation of the "criticality index'' n that quantifies the degree of endogeneity...

We present a detailed methodological study of the application of the modified profile likelihood method for the calibration of nonlinear financial models characterised by a large number of parameters. We apply the general approach to the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) model of...

From 1973 to 2014, the common stock of U.S. banks with loan growth in the top quartile of banks over a three-year period significantly underperforms the common stock of banks with loan growth in the bottom quartile over the next three years. The benchmark-adjusted cumulative difference in...

We investigate the distributions of e-drawdowns and e-drawups of the most liquid futures financial contracts of the world at time scales of 30 seconds. The e-drawdowns (resp. e-drawups) generalise the notion of runs of negative (resp. positive) returns so as to capture the risks to which...

We introduce a new measure of activity of financial markets that provides a direct access to their level of endogeneity. This measure quantifies how much of price changes are due to endogenous feedback processes, as opposed to exogenous news. For this, we calibrate the self-excited conditional...

The authors assess the performance of the real-time diagnostic, openly presented to the public on the website of the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) at ETH Zurich, of the bubble regime that developed in Chinese stock markets since mid-2014 and that started to burst in June 2015. The analysis...