This study examines the impact of credit rating announcements from the three leading credit rating agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch)on the Credit Default Swap Spreads of corporates and their spillover effects within industries. We find, that both downgrades and upgrades have an impact on the CDS...

The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) considerably changed the nature of European equity markets. Introduced in November 2007, it allowed alternative trading venues to compete for order flow with traditional exchanges. This paper studies the impact of increased fragmentation of...

We study the trading behavior of individual investors in leverage bank-issued products around earnings announcements. The trading activity increases substantially around earnings announcements. Aggregated individual investor trading is strongly correlated, both pre- and post event. We find...

We study the impact of retail investor information demand on trading in bank-issued investment and leverage structured products, which are specifically designed for retail investors. Stock-specific information demand positively predicts speculative trading activity. Further, we find a positive...

Venture projects are fraught with exogenous market risk and endogenous agency risk. We apply a real options perspective to analyze the investment decision of the venture capitalist (VC) in this set-up. The solutions presented are conflictive: the VC reduces his exposure to exogenous risk by...

We scrutinize the use of value at risk as traders' limit in banks. Thereby, we compare a bank with uninformed traders dealing on a perfect capital market, with a bank in which traders receive a noisy signal about the future price of the stock they are dealing in. Additionally, they are able to...