We propose a novel and tractable equilibrium model to study how information asymmetry, competition among market makers, and investors' risk aversion affect asset pricing, market illiquidity and welfare. The main innovation is that market makers compete through choosing simultaneously quantities...

The paper discusses criteria for comparing risk aversion of decision makers when outcomes are multidimensional. A weak concept, "commodity specific greater risk aversion", is based on the comparison of risk premia paid in a specified commodity. A stronger concept, "uniformly greater risk...

Two factors have proven to be strongly relevant for the subprime mortgage crisis. The first is the lack of screening incentives of originators, which had not been anticipated by investors. The second is that investors relied too much on credit ratings. We examine whether investors have learned...

The subprime crisis would never have occurred had investors not been such enthusiastic consumers of subprime securities. The investors now say, somewhat self-servingly (but probably correctly), that they did not understand the securities - securities for which they were willing to pay very high...

This paper studies the dynamics of emerging excess returns in a industry-by-industry context. Differently from the recent financial literature, which mainly focuses on 'total market indexes', we perform a standard ex-post empirical analysis aimed at capturing the industries' contribution to...

The average equity risk premium (ERP) in emerging markets is well-known to be significantly higher than in developed markets. But, key reasons for this remain unclear, contributing to investment strategy uncertainty. Here, we use industry-level data for 19 emerging market countries across three...

This paper investigates the role of loan contract terms in the performance of consumer credit. Taking advantage of a sample of accepted and rejected consumer loans from a Czech commercial bank, I estimate the elasticity of loan demand and find that borrowers with a high probability of default...

High sovereign debt in advanced economies has recently revived the debate about the role of coordination problems and self-fulfilling beliefs as drivers of sovereign default risk. I show how default risk can be decomposed in a solvency-risk component and a coordination-risk component. I then...

We analyse the incentives for information disclosure on financial markets. We show that borrowers may have incentives to voluntarily obfuscate information and that doing so is most attractive for claims that are inherently hard to value, such as portfolios of subprime mortgages. Interestingly,...