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...

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...

By analyzing a full dataset of 437 Italian equity crowdfunding campaigns over the period 2014-2020, and then by focusing on a sub-sample of 79 projects posted on the websites of platforms from January 2020 to June 2020, this chapter explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Italian...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical...

We document that investors can actually profit from the contemporaneous link between earnings accuracy and recommendation profitability (Loh and Mian (2006)). Differentiating between "able" and "lucky" analysts we suggest an implementable, i.e. look-ahead bias free, trading strategy that yields...

While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

Lack of transparency in securitization transactions significantly contributed to the severe financial crisis of 20072009. To increase transparency we propose a new mechanism: financial claims with fingerprints. They would allow market participants at each stage of the securitization process to...

Given the growing importance of terrorism in today's world, it is essential to understand its impact on the global economy. This paper examines the case of Israel to consider the impact of this phenomenon on the nation's economy. Specifically, it will aim to determine whether the Israeli...

The Thomson VentureXpert database has been used for over two decades by practitioners and academics to benchmark and judge the performance of private equity and venture capital. A closer look at aggregated and individual figures, however, reveals severe anomalies in the underlying data which are...