This study calibrates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis using a new calibration approach based on credit default swaps. The risk premium term structure was flat before the crisis and downward sloping during the crisis. The instantaneous risk...

This paper presents a set of probability density functions for Euribor outturns in three months’ time, estimated from the prices of options on Euribor futures. It is the first official and freely available dataset to span the complete history of Euribor futures options, thus comprising over...

We study the relative effect of venture capital and bank finance on large manufacturing firms in local U.S. markets. Theory predicts that with venture capital, the firm size distribution should become more stretched-out to the right, but it’s ambiguous on the effect of banks on large firms....

It has often been argued during the recent credit crisis that commercial banks’ involvement in investment banking activities might have had an impact on the intensity of their underwriting standards. We turn to evidence from the period prior to the complete revocation of the Glass-Steagall Act...

This paper uses data on German government bond futures options to examine the behaviour of market expectations around monetary policy actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). In particular, this paper focuses on the asymmetries in bond market expectations, as measured by the skewness of...

Financial decision makers often consider the information in currency option valuations when making assessments about future exchange rates. The purpose of this paper is to systematically assess the quality of option based volatility, interval and density forecasts. We use a unique dataset...

In this paper we study risk-neutral densities (RNDs) for the German stock market. The use of option prices allows us to quantify the risk-neutral probabilities of various levels of the DAX index. For the period from December 1995 to November 2001, we implement the mixture of log-normals model...

This paper proposes a new test for the asset pricing model of the exchange rate. It examines whether the way market analysts generate their forecasts is closer to the one implied by the asset pricing model, or to any of those implied by some alternative models. The asset pricing model is...

During the last decade, markets for covered warrants (bank-issued options) have flourished in Europe and Asia. In these markets, investors often face a choice between many instruments that differ only slightly from each other. Based on retail trades in call options on the German DAX index, this...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of risk-taking decisions in an economy that is prone to systemic risk, captured by financial amplification effects that occur in response to strong adverse shocks. It shows that decentralized agents who have unconstrained access to a complete set of Arrow...