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...

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...

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...