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...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

Relationship lending helps reduce asymmetric information, which potentially creates benefits for borrowers. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We conduct a meta-analysis to summarize and explain the heterogeneity in the results in the literature using hand-collected information from 101...

This study explores how information costs in host countries affected foreign expansion of the top 100 multinational banks from 2001 to 2007. Indices representing characteristics of credit reporting systems are used to proxy for banks' information costs in 103 host countries. We find that banks...

This Article argues that information gaps—pockets of information that are pertinent and knowable but not currently known—are a byproduct of shadow banking and a meaningful source of systemic risk. It lays the foundation for this claim by juxtaposing the regulatory regime governing the shadow...

One of the enduring principles of federal securities regulation is the mantra that bonds are securities, while commercial loans are not. Yet the corporate bond and loan markets in the U.S. are rapidly converging, putting significant pressure on the disparity in their regulatory treatment. As...

This paper investigates the potential aggravation of the Debt Overhang problem in banking stemming from the introduction of the new Basel III liquidity ratio: the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR). By replacing short for long term debt (or terming out long term debt) on the back of the NSFR, banks...

An economy's ability to resist adverse shocks, such as an economic recession or natural disaster, is associated with its financial system structure due to different countercyclical funding capabilities. This paper uses a novel database of bank headquarter locations in a cross-country comparison...

On November 14th, 2014, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum – and CNMV, Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores – the Spanish Authority for supervision of securities markets – jointly organized a conference in Madrid: Challenges in Securities Markets Regulation: Investor...