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...

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...

In this paper we present a new approach to analyse the interconnectedness between a macro-level network and a local-level network. Our methodology is developed on the Diebold and Yilmaz connectedness measure and it considers the presence of entities within a global network which can influence...

The risk reducing benefits of the sovereign bond-backed security (SBBS) proposal of Brunnermeier et al (2011, 2016, 2017) have been assessed in terms of the likely losses that different kinds of holders would suffer under simulated default scenarios. However, the effects of mark-to-market losses...

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...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the crosssection and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

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...