This paper examines whether recently introduced "village funds", one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the...

The village funds programme in Thailand is one of the biggest microfinance programmes in the world aiming at improving access to finance and income in rural areas. Earlier studies indicate that the programme is successful in realising its ambitions to some degree. We extend this work by...

This paper examines the puzzlingly high unexploited momentum returns from a new perspective. We analyze characteristics of momentum traders in a sample of 692 fund managers. We find that momentum traders are "defined" by their short-term horizon, by a behavioural view on the market and by a...

This paper examines financial professionals' overconfidence in their forecasting performance. We compare individuals' self-rating of performance with the true performance, both measured relative to the same peer group. The forecasters in our sample show overconfidence on average, although to a...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in its current form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation of voting shares to emerging and...

This paper examines the relative information shares of the Bund, i.e. the ten-year Euro bond future contract on German sovereign debt, versus two futures with shorter maturity. We find that the Bund is most important but does not dominate price discovery. The other contracts also have relevant -...

The use of technical analysis by financial market professionals is not well understood. This paper thus analyzes survey evidence from 692 fund managers in five countries, the vast majority of whom rely on technical analysis. At a forecasting horizon of weeks, technical analysis is the most...

We show that information about the counterparty of a trade affects the future trading decisions of individual traders. The effect is such that traders tend to reverse their order flow in line with the better-informed counterparties. Informed traders primarily incorporate their own private as...

This study examines profits and speculation in the USD/EUR trading of a bank in Germany over a four-month period. Dealing activity at the bank generates profits but speculation does not seem to contribute to this. We find that speculative positions fail to become profitable within a 30-minutes'...

Early warning systems (EWSs) are subject to restrictions that apply to exchange rates in general: fundamentals matter but their influence is small and unstable. Despite this limitation four major lessons emerge: First, EWSs have robust forecasting power and thus help policy-makers to prevent...