This paper considers the growth of dark pools: trading venues for equities without pre-trade transparency. It first documents the emergence and expansion of dark pools in European equity markets in the context of regulatory changes and increased high-frequency trading (HFT). It finds that the...

Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees that resemble out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to tail risk. Using the U.S. life insurance industry as a laboratory, we present a model in which variable annuity (VA) guarantees and associated hedging operate within the regulatory...

We develop a framework to analyse the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market as a network of risk transfers among counterparties. From a theoretical perspective, we introduce the notion of flow-of-risk and provide sufficient conditions for a bow-tie network architecture to endogenously emerge as a...

In this paper, we show both theoretically and empirically that the size of over-the-counter (OTC) markets can be reduced without affecting individual net positions. First, we find that the networked nature of these markets generates an excess of notional obligations between the aggregate gross...

We perform a network analysis of the centrally cleared interest rate derivatives market in the European Union, by looking at counterparty relations within both direct (house) clearing and client clearing. Since the majority of the gross notional is transferred within central counterparties and...

Using a sample of more than 18,000 Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities,or UCITS, this paper aims to provide a first overview of the use of credit default swaps by EU UCITS funds. We show that UCITS funds only account for a small share of the overall EU credit...

Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

We show that the news is a rich source of data on distressed firm links that drive firm- level and aggregate risks. The news tends to report about links in which a less popular firm is distressed and may contaminate a more popular firm. This constitutes a contagion channel that yields...

Investment in intangible assets has become an increasingly important driver of productivity growth in OECD countries. Facing stronger informational asymmetries and harder to value collateral, intangible investment is subject to more severe financial constraints and relies more on internal rather...

This paper presents a detailed set of new, quantity-based indicators of financial integration in the euro area. The indicators are based on granular data from securities holdings statistics and help us disentangle the main drivers of the portfolio changes observed since the financial crisis....