We identify the origin of the contradicting perspectives on credit creation offered by Austrian, Mainstream and Post Keynesian economists as the neglect of the primacy of such assets as goods, properties and securities, which always pre-exist any transaction and loan. We develop a unified...

We analyze a novel feedback mechanism between market and funding liquidity that causes self-fulfilling liquidity dry-ups. Financial firms facing funding withdrawals have an incentive to acquire information about their assets. Those with good assets gain by resorting to outside liquidity sources...

We investigate the channel through which fluctuations in the market liquidity of real-sector repo collateral cause arbitrage crashes and failure of systemically important intermediaries during the global financial crisis. Intermediaries pledge productive capital as repo collateral to fund the...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

Prediction (or information) markets are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoff depends on unknown future events. Studying prediction markets allows to avoid many problems, which arise in some artificially designed behavioral experiments investigating collective decision making...

We show that options written on stocks with low prices are over-priced. This effect is robust to a variety of tests, controlling for common stock- and option- risk characteristics, and to reasonable transaction costs. Natural experiments corroborate this finding; options tend to become...

This paper examines the impact of central clearing on the credit default swap (CDS) market using a sample of voluntarily cleared single-name contracts. Consistent with central clearing reducing counterparty risk, CDS spreads increase around the commencement of central clearing and are lower than...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...