Did the Comprehensive Assessment (CA), preceding the Single Supervisory Mechanism's launch in Europe, achieve its aims of producing new valuable information for the market? We show that the CA achieved the goal of increasing transparency: investors were able to detect weak banks at the...

Financial instruments in levels 2 and 3 for accounting purposes are complex and opaque products and their evaluation is problematic. The amount of these assets held by banks in Europe is exceptionally high (€3 trillion in 2019) and there is no empirical evidence as to the extent, if at all, to...

This book focuses on political connections in the United States. It contributes to the literature on the link between politics and business, and on the impact of political connections on firm value, by considering industry-level regulation as a discriminating factor in the investigation of firm...

In the last years of the twentieth century central banks started strengthening their communication strategy, making it easier to analyze the evolution of central banks' functions and role over time and space. In this chapter we employ a topic modeling approach to investigate the differences in...

Do investors like political connections? We answer this question by exploiting a unique political measure and analyzing the market reaction after the US Supreme Court decision in 2010, which allowed firms to establish a new form of political connection through the employment of independent...

The opacity of the banking business has been identified as a main source of stock crash risk. Level 3 financial instruments are particularly opaque products, as their fair value is neither directly available nor measurable using market prices. Focusing on Europe, we find robust evidence that L3...