Structured Investment Vehicles or SIVs are highly complex derivative-related vehicles and products, typically involving offshore “bankruptcy-remote” special purpose companies and trusts, complex rules for the management of portfolios of derivative assets and additional rules for the...

We study the relative and absolute pricing of CMBX contracts (commercial real estate derivatives) during the recent financial crisis. Using a structural CMBX pricing model we find little systematic mispricing relative to REIT equity and options. We do find short-term deviations from this...

During the 2007-2009 crises financial institutions have come under increasing pressure from regulators, politicians and shareholders to change their compensation practices in order to remove the incentive for short-term excessive risk taking In this paper we analyze how commonly used executive...

We consider a stochastic volatility model of the mean-reverting type to describe the evolution of a firm's values instead of the classical approach by Merton with geometric Brownian motions. We develop an analytical expression for the default probability. Our simulation results indicate that the...

Regulators have embraced the idea of pre-arranging bank recapitalizations through (funded or unfunded) contingent capital issuance. Contingent capital is intended to be triggered when a bank is headed toward failure in order to provide an automatic equity injection that keeps the bank out of...

This article examines the impact of regulation on lending standards during the mortgage boom. We exploit the overall regulatory wedge between banks and independent mortgage companies (IMCs) and a variation in this regulatory wedge across states induced by a cross-sectional variation in state...

(Zheng, 2009) does not realize that the government provides nonrecourse loans to investors to buy toxic assets. Nonrecourse loans allow the borrower to walk away from the loan with no penalties besides ceding the asset that the loan purchased. Thus (Zheng, 2009)'s conclusions that less well...

This article explores empirically the assertion that Islamic Banks have higher credit risk than Conventional Banks. A definition, identification and the way to manage credit risk are given to each Islamic financial tool. This risk is, then, measured on nine Islamic and nine Conventional Banks,...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to contribute to the long-running debate as to whether the demand curves for stocks slope downward. The U.S. Treasury sold 5.27 billion shares of Citigroup's common stock during trading hours in April 26, 2010, to December 6, 2010. Using a geometric...

This paper studies the factors that were associated with a bank's early exit from TARP in 2009. Executive pay restrictions were often a rationale cited for early TARP exit, and high levels of CEO pay were associated with banks being significantly more likely to escape TARP. In addition, we find...