Cross-country capital flows have increased greatly, since the liberalization of internationalcapital markets two decades ago. Equity home bias, while less severe than earlier, remains sizeableand is observed in all industrialized countries. There are broadly two classes of explanations for...

Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them "unique" is the combination of accepting...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

This paper suggests that changing risk conveys information useful to improve performance.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

This study offers the unique opportunity to analyze how an unprecedented crisis such as the September 11 tragedy in uences expected returns and volatility forecasts of individual investors. Via e-mail, we asked a randomly selected group of individual investors with accounts at a German online...

Empirical research documents that temporary trends in stock pricemovements exist. Moreover, riding a trend can be a profitable investment strategy. (...)

We provide the impact on asset prices of search-and-bargaining frictions in over-the-counter markets. Under natural conditions, prices are lower and illiquidity discounts higher when counterparties are harder to find, when sellers have less bargaining power, when the fraction of qualified owners...

The main goal of this paper is to present various descriptive statistics on demographic information, investment strategy, portfolio positions, and trading activity.

Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results foryield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similarmodeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadaysas hedging instruments for options on realized variance. We consider the...