This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

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 use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

This paper examines the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities with a particular focus on their response to price changes. For identification, we use security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Our results suggest that...

In both the subprime crisis and the euro-area crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales, aimed mainly at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators' intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater...

The paper investigates firms' willingness to match the currency composition of their assets and liabilities and their incentives to deviate from perfect matching. Using detailed information at the loan contract level for the Hungarian non-financial corporate sector, the paper provides strong...

In several recent studies unit root methods have been used in detection of financial bubbles in asset prices. The basic idea is that fundamental changes in the autocorrelation structure of relevant time series imply the presence of a rational price bubble. We provide cross-country evidence for...

We study the implications of information technology (IT) in banking for financial stability, using data on US banks' IT equipment and the tech-background of their executives. We find that one standard deviation higher pre-crisis IT adoption led to 10% fewer non-performing loans during the global...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between bank risk and sovereign risk. But policymakers have not reached consensus on whether and how to reform the regulatory treatment of banks' sovereign exposures. To inform policy discussions, this paper simulates portfolio...