According to conventional indicators, the euro-area financial integration has receded since 2007, mainly in the money market, sovereign debt market and uncollateralized credit markets. But price-based measures of debt market segmentation are inappropriate when solvency risk differs across...

type="main" xml:id="ecop12029-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Since 2008, eurozone sovereign yields have diverged sharply, and so have the corresponding credit default swap (CDS) premia. At the same time, banks' sovereign debt portfolios have featured an increasing home bias. In this paper, we investigate the...</p>

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

This paper distils three lessons for bank regulation from the experience of the 2009-12 euro-area financial crisis. First, it highlights the key role that sovereign debt exposures of banks have played in the feedback loop between bank and fiscal distress, and inquires how the regulation of...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. This induces under-diversification: a risk-averse arbitrageur will optimally advertise only one of several mispriced assets, and overweigh it in his...

We present a model where firms compete for scarce managerial talent ("alpha") and managers are risk-averse. When managers cannot move across firms after being hired, employers learn about their talent, allocate them efficiently to projects and provide insurance to low-quality managers. When...

We analyze corporate fraud in a model where managers have superior information but, due to private benefits from empire building, are biased against liquidation. This may induce them to misreport information and even bribe auditors when liquidation would be value-increasing. To restrain fraud,...

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from...