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...

Central banks have run during the crisis a wide set of monetary policy interventions using new instruments and techniques to restore the monetary stability and thus re-establish the stability of financial (and banking) systems. We analyze the effect of monetary policy interventions on stock...

We analyse the wide array of rescue programmes adopted in several countries, following Lehman Brothers' default in September 2008, in order to support banks and other financial institutions. We first provide an overview of the programmes, comparing their characteristics, magnitudes and...

The UBS- Credit Suisse (CS) merger in March 2023, one of the biggest banking unions in history, was an emergency rescue deal engineered by Swiss authorities to avoid more market-shaking turmoil in global banking. The merger resulted in a significant increase in the combined stakeholder net...

We analyse the wide array of rescue programmes adopted in several countries, following Lehman Brothers' default in September 2008, in order to support banks and other financial institutions. We first provide an overview of the programmes, comparing their characteristics, magnitudes and...

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...

After the governance crisis of 2001-2003 and the regulatory response through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the European corporate governance codes, the financial crisis has revealed persistent governance problems in financial institutions relating to executives, non-executives and shareholders. For...

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...