Do markets value contract protections and does the quality of a legal system affect such valuations? We answer these questions by analysing a quasi-natural experiment whereby after January 1, 2013, newly issued sovereign bonds of all Eurozone countries started to include Collective Action...

We study the impact of sovereign bond auctions on secondary markets and their feedback to the sovereigns' debt cost. This linkage is established through the actions of primary dealers, participating in the auctions, and also acting as market-makers. We model financially-constrained primary...

In March 2020, against the backdrop of a worsening Covid crisis, some segments of the money market fund (MMF) industry faced severe redemption pressures. Given their central role within the short term funding market, MMFs were at the heart of financial stability concerns, and legitimately...

In this paper we examine sovereign bond yield spread (BYS) spillovers between Euro zone countries during a turbulent period encompassing both the global financial crisis and the Euro zone debt crisis. Using the VAR-based spillover index approach of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and impulse response...

Europe remains a tempting destination for East Asian SWFs. Almost a third of their investments have been committed to EU countries. Nearly all of the assets have been invested by Chinese and Singaporean funds. The investment policy of East Asian SWFs has significantly evolved over the past few...

With a rapidly aging population, Portugal faces some serious pension challenges including a Social Security system which is under pressure, and pension benefits gradually approaching levels that will require individuals to supplement Social Security with private savings. In addition, Portugal...

This research analyzes and extend the study of contagion for BRICS Emerging Stock Markets in the context of the last two international financial crises: the Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. We investigate changes in the relationship and the co-movements...

The present article contains a brief but comprehensive overview of the development of the Capital Markets Union (CMU) project in the EU to further deepen EU capital markets’ integration. After the Introduction, it first discusses the Commission’s 2015 CMU Action Plan and its follow-up,...

The aim of the present University notes is to provide a brief but comprehensive overview of the European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council “on Markets in Crypto-Assets (…)” (MiCAR), which was submitted on 24 September 2020. It is not...

The current economic crisis has hit all European countries hard, but some are much more severely affected others. The problems manifest in European peripheral countries, especially Ireland, Spain, and Greece, have roots in domestic policy mistakes. However, the European context of these policy...