A costless, fully revealing signalling equilibrium is derived from two easily understandable conditions. The outsidet-protection condition states that the outsiders relate the price which they offer to pay for a security inversely to the supply of this security which they interpret as a quality...

This essay reviews a cornerstone of the European Banking Union project, the resolution of systemically important banks. The focus is on the inherent conflict between a possible intervention by resolution authorities, conditional on a crisis situation, and effective prevention prior to a crisis....

Many valuation models in financial economics are developed using the pricing kernel approach to adjust for risk through the equivalent martingale representation. Often it is assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that the pricing kernel exhibits constant elasticity with respect to the price of the...

We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the risk aversion of an agent's derived utility function to increase with independent, zero-mean background risk. This condition is weaker than standard risk aversion. For small risks, the condition is that the ratio of the third to the first...

In this paper, we derive an equilibrium in which some investors buy call/put options on the market portfolio while others sell them. Since investors are assumed to have similar risk-averse preferences, the demand for these contracts is not explained by differences in the shape of utility...

We consider random wealth of the multiplicative form xy, where x and y are statistically independent random variables. We assume that x is endogenous to the economic agent, but that y is an exogenous and uninsurable background risk. Our main focus is on how the randomness of y affects...