As most Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) engage in securities lending or are based on total return swaps, they expose their investors to counterparty risk. To mitigate the funds' exposure, their counterparties must pledge collateral. In this paper, the authors present a framework to study collateral...

The title "shadow banking system" sounds pejorative and certainly is in the minds of most people who work in or watch the business of money and credit. In the world of subprime real estate, abuse of private financial vehicles with insurance enhancements and ratings led to the collapse of the...

The paper aims to study the evolution of the financial regulation and supervision in Hungary from 1987, the year when the foundations of the two-tier banking system were laid. After a brief overview of the history of the Hungarian financial system we turn our attention to the history of the...

With the recent financial crisis, many financial intermediaries experienced strains created by declining asset values and a loss of funding sources. In reviewing these stress events, one notices that some arrangements appear to have been more stable—that is, better able to withstand shocks to...

In the present paper we study the performance of young closed-end funds (CEFs) in Greece. Using monthly CEF data from 1997 to 2007, we provide evidence showing that young funds underperform both old funds and the market. As in Kaplan and Schoar (2005), we note that new underperforming funds...

The Chinese stock market has witnessed a dramatic increase of analyst coverage over the past years. While analyst revisions clearly exhibit optimistic biases, we find significant market reactions to both upgrades and downgrades. However, in contrast to findings in existing literature for other...

Ibrahim & Ong (2008) use operational restrictions of Islamic Investment Guidelines and conduct a thought experiment on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) under restricted and non-restricted schemes. We use financial restriction and reach somewhat different results. Compliant REITs...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

We propose a new method of testing asset pricing models that relies on using quantities rather than prices or returns. We use the capital flows into and out of mutual funds to infer which risk model investors use. We derive a simple test statistic that allows us to infer, from a set of candidate...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...