When people share risk in financial markets, intermediaries provide costly enforcement for most trades and, hence, are an integral part of financial marketsu0092 organization. We assess the degree of risk sharing that can be achieved through financial markets when enforcement is based on the...

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...

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...

In 2006 the external net borrowing requirement of the Spanish economy was almost 8% of GDP, after having been in balance between 1993 and 1998. This increased borrowing requirement is the financial mirror image of a growth model, in which corporate and households' investments are generating an...

One feature of the global economy in recent years has been the increasing number and importance of new investment funds (private equity (PE), hedge funds (HFs), and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs)), which are sometimes referred to as alternative investment funds (AIFs). This increase has...

This report examines whether investment funds – in particular, private equity, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds – help to revive underperforming companies and thereby contribute to employment growth or whether, on the contrary, they strive to maximise financial returns at the expense...

The study examines the incidence of vulnerability across the EU28 and Iceland and Norway, and the factors explaining any observed vulnerability. The study uses a range of information sources (literature review, stakeholder interviews, consumer survey and consumer experiments in five countries)...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

This paper analyses the link between finance and growth by studying the effect that the process of financial deregulation and harmonisation of banking laws at the EU level has brought about on growth over the last 40 years. Our main findings point to the existence of a positive long-run growth...

We provide a general characterization of the structure of rational expectations equilibria of any degree of revelation for pure exchange, sequential economies, with deffinitely many states of private information, an incomplete financial market and nominal assets. We estimate the dimension of the...