Why do countries differ so much in terms of their financial systems? Are banks and equity competing or complementary sources of financing for firms? To address these questions, I study various determinants of capital market development and whether these determinants favor one form of capital...

Does financial development contribute to economic growth? The literature finds that an expansion in financial resources is useful for economic growth if the degree of financial development is under a certain threshold; otherwise, the expansion is detrimental to growth. Almost every published...

Total notional principal outstanding for single-name credit default swaps (CDSs) based on corporate and sovereign reference entities grew significantly through June 2011, but, following the global credit crisis and Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, notional amounts on single-name CDSs outstanding...

This paper reviews recent research at the intersection of industrial organization and corporate finance on credit default swap (CDS) markets. These markets have been at the center of the financial crisis of 2007-09 and many aspects of their operation are not well understood. The paper covers...

This paper constitutes a discussion of the rise of Peer-to-peer loans as alternative investments. Peer-to-peer loans are being incorporated into portfolios in the interest of diversification. This paper outlines this strategy and provides a guided tour of this new alternative asset class along...

From 2010-2015, China liberalized margin lending, resulting in an unprecedented expansion of margin loans to financially constrained households. We implement a regression discontinuity design based on the ranking procedure used during the deregulation and estimate a large impact of this credit...

We model aggregate loss rates on credit portfolios dynamically using a default intensity approach. The default intensity we employ is allowed to depend on both observable macroeconomic variables and unobserved frailties. We use the model to extract measures of the credit cycle from US bank...