This paper investigates whether the well-documented asset growth effect on stock returns exists across both profit and loss firms in European capital markets. We find that the asset growth anomaly is more pronounced across loss firms and is significantly dampened by the inclusion of profit firms...

What is the current state of sovereign credit risk across Euro zone? Does the recent fiscal crisis extend to other (non Euro zone) countries? Is Greece the center of the problem? How did the current fiscal crisis in the Euro area start? Who is behind it? Why can it evolve? How can it be...

Regional and bilateral liquidity arrangements have gained increasing prominence over the past decades, not least during the recent global financial crisis. This has important consequences for the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a crisis lender and raises questions regarding the...

The recent European economic crisis has dramatically exposed the failures of the various institutional mechanisms in place to maintain economic stability in Europe, and has unveiled the difficulty in achieving international coordination on fiscal and financial stability policies. Drawing on the...

The paper develops an easy-to-apply test for contagion. In order to address the main challenge of any contagion test, that of endogeneity, the testing is conducted in the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework where we assume the reduced form errors follow a mixed-normal distribution....

This paper examines U.S. investors' portfolio investment patterns since the global financial crisis, particularly since the European debt crisis that began in late 2009. The global financial crisis during 2007-2009 was accompanied by an increase in U.S. investors' home bias. U.S. investors...

A crucial and outstanding issue for the European economy and democracy.In March 2009, the European Commission recognized the need to put "the interests of European investors, consumers and SMEs at the centre of the financial markets reform”. The Commission therefore announced it will "ensure...

Securitization is considered to be one of the biggest financial innovations of the last century. It is also regarded as both a catalyst and solution to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a popular method of financing the mortgage and consumer credit markets, aspects of the global securitization...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...