The aim of this paper is to present and briefly analyse the provisions of the recent (24 May 2018) European Commission's proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council, whose objective is to lay down a general framework for sovereign bond-backed securities (SBBSs). It is...

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...

Most corporate bond research on liquidity and dealer inventories is based on the USD-denominated bonds transactions in the US reported to TRACE. Some of these bonds, however, are also traded in Europe, and those trades are not subject to the TRACE reporting requirements. Leveraging our access to...

This paper analyzes Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) in Europe. We document various aspects associated with European SPACs by using a unique and hand-collected data sample encompassing all 19 SPACs which have been listed on European stock exchanges since 2005. The paper shows that...

This paper analyzes determinants of home bias in equity funds based on monthly holdings data using panel and quantile regressions. We investigate 699 equity funds, domiciled in fifteen European countries, that broadly invested in European stocks from January 2003 to December 2016. More than...

This paper introduces a return-based approach to studying a possible home bias of equity funds by estimating their exposures in their home countries. We first confirm the robustness of our approach using simulated portfolios with different proportions of domestic and foreign stocks. The...

This paper examines the relative performance of small-caps vs. large caps surrounding periods of peaks and troughs of economic activity, and reexamines the relationship between the small firm anomaly and the business cycle. Small-cap firms outperform large caps over the year subsequent to an...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

We show that aggregate insider trading (AIT) in the S&P 500 is a reliable predictor of the U.S. equity premium, while AIT outside the S&P 500 seems to be uninformative. Aggregate trading of S&P 500 insiders outperforms a broad set of well-established predictors considering in- and out-of-sample...