Conventional banking practices do not easily accommodate the financial needs of poor persons. Group-lending, on the other hand, has found several advantages in the context of poor borrowers with no collateral to offer. An important advantage is that the bank’s losses due to unsuccessful...

In the work of the Basel Committee there has been a tradition of distinguishing market from credit risk and to treat both categories independently in the calculation of risk capital. In practice positions in a portfolio depend simultaneously on both market and credit risk factors. In this case,...

Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor index or Jensen's alpha, based on the mean-variance framework, are widely used to rank mutual funds. However, performance measures that consider risk by taking into account only losses, such as Value-at-Risk...

We argue for incorporating the financial economics of market microstructure into the financial econometrics of asset return volatility estimation. In particular, we use market microstructure theory to derive the cross-correlation function between latent returns and market microstructure noise,...

Central counterparties (CCPs) have increasingly become a cornerstone of financial markets infrastructure. We present a model where trades are time-critical, liquidity is limited and there is limited enforcement of trades. We show a CCP novating trades implements efficient trading behaviour. It...

This paper develops a theory of multiple unit auctions with short squeezes in the post- auction market. This is especially relevant for financial and commodity markets where players may enter the auction with established forward positions. We study how a potential short squeeze impacts on...

This paper studies the adverse price effects of convergence trading. I assume two assets with identical cash flows traded in segmented markets. Initially, there is gap between the prices of the assets, because local traders’ face asymmetric temporary shocks. In the absence of arbitrageurs, the...

The stability of the financial system at higher loss levels is either characterized by asymptotic dependence or asymptotic independence. If asymptotically independent, the dependency, when present, eventually dies out completely at the more extreme quantiles, as in case of the multivariate...

We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different...

This paper investigates the role of credit market size as a determinant of business cycle fluctuations. First, using OECD data I document that credit market depth mitigates the impact of variations in productivity to output volatility. Then, I use a business cycle model with borrowing limits a...