This paper aims at analysing the mortality patterns of hedge funds over the period January 1994 to May 2008. In particular, we investigate the extent to which a spillover of risk among hedge funds through redemptions and failures of other funds has affected the probability of fund failure. We...

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 hedge fund industry has risen in 2007 to the top of the international political agenda, yet the debate surrounding it is limited by a lack of understanding of how the industry functions, or even how it is to be defined. The industry consists largely of investment funds operating from...

This paper estimates the factors underlying the volatility of the euro overnight interest rate and its transmission along the euro area money market yield curve. A new multivariate unobserved components model is proposed allowing for both long-memory and stationary cyclical dynamics. Using...

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...

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...

The competition between a central securities depository (CSD) and a custodian bank is analysed in a Stackelberg model. The CSD sets its prices first, the custodian bank follows. There are many investor banks each of which has to decide whether to use the service of the CSD or of the custodian...

We study sovereign yield dynamics and order flow in the largest euro-area treasury markets. We exploit unique transaction data to explain daily yield changes in the ten-year government bonds of Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany. We use a state space model to decompose these changes into (i) a...