Several studies have analyzed discretionary accruals to address earnings-smoothing behaviors in the banking industry. We argue that the characteristic link between accruals and earnings may be nonlinear, since both the incentives to manipulate income and the practical way to do so depend...

Contingent Convertibles (“CoCos”) are contingent capital instruments which convert into shares, or have a principal write down, if a trigger event takes place. CoCos exhibit the undesirable so-called death-spiral effect: by actively hedging the equity risk, investors can (unintentionally)...

This paper proposes a methodology to analyse the risk and return of large loan portfolios in a joint setting. I propose a tractable model to obtain the distribution of loan returns from observed interest rates and default frequencies. I follow a sectoral approach that captures the heterogeneous...

This paper proposes a new approach to estimate the idiosyncratic volatility premium. In contrast to the popular two-pass regression method, this approach relies on a novel GMM-type estimation procedure that uses only a single cross-section of return observations to obtain consistent estimates....

Recent theoretical works have found a link between return sign forecastability and conditional volatility. This paper compares the predictive performance of the conditional country risk and the conditional residual risk in forecasting the direction of change in the return on the UK stock market...

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households’ borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987–2008), from rural Bangladesh. We find that households’ access to...

This paper performs a thorough statistical examination of the time-series properties of the daily market volatility index (VIX) from the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The motivation lies not only on the widespread consensus that the VIX is a barometer of the overall market sentiment as...

This study tests for a break in the persistence of EMU government bond yield spreads examining data from France, Italy and Spain and using German interest rates as a kind of benchmark. The results reported here provide evidence for breaks between 2006 and 2008. The persistence of the yield...

What is the role of financial speculation in determining the real oil price? We find that while macroeconomic shocks have been the main real oil price upward driver since mid-1980s, financial shocks have sizably contributed since early 2000s as well, and at a much larger extent since mid-2000s....