The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

Opacity fosters price contagion that exacerbates the speculative cycles of bubbles and crashes that create financial instability. We find that banks with larger investments in opaque assets benefitted more from intra-industry revaluations associated with announcements of mergers in the period...

This paper is concerned with the allegation that fair value accounting rules have contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It focuses on one particular channel for that contribution: the impact of fair value on actual or potential failure of banks. The paper compares four...

Using a large sample of the Chinese public firms, this study documents that the government intervention via state ownership can mitigate the stock crash risk. The mitigation effect of state ownership is more pronounced in the crisis periods and in the sample of firms with shares held by central...

Government interventions such as bailouts are often implemented in times of high uncertainty. Policymakers may therefore rely on information from financial markets to guide their decisions. We propose a model in which a policymaker learns from market activity and where market participants have...

In both the subprime crisis and the euro-area crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales, aimed mainly at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators' intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater...

The Mexican crisis of 1994-95 had strong spillover effects on Argentina. The Argentine government successfully announced a series of policies to mitigate the contagion effects. This paper studies how capital markets reacted to each policy announcement and news. Capital markets welcomed...

This work provides a comprehensive study of the January 2008 stock market downturn and its impact on DAX index. We find three possible causes of the crash: adverse economic news, technical trading signals and possible market manipulation (by SocGen). We find strong interdependencies among world...

This essay documents the boom and bust of the Chinese A-share bubble in 2014-2015. The short-lived bull market started with the expectation of the state sector reform, capital market opening-up, and monetary easing. It was then fueled and heated by the flooding of new investors and the runaway...

This paper attempts to answer the question whether the threat of systemic risk in banking exists only on a national or on a European level. Following De Nicolo and Kwast (2001), mean rolling-window correlations between bank stock returns are used as a measure for interdependencies among European...