We use a spatial Probit model to study banking crises and show that the probability of a systemic banking crisis depends on contagion and that this effect may result from business connections between institutions or from similarities between banking systems.

The potential manager-investor conflict of interests in mutual funds is a classic agency problem. Using a database from Portugal, we show that mutual funds tend to overweight the stocks issued by their parent and underweigh the stocks of competitors. This cannot be explained by performance,...

This paper studies the factors that determine the financial literacy level of the Portuguese individual investors and explores the relation between financial literacy and financial behavior, particularly portfolio diversification. Our results suggest that the average financial literacy level of...

Several supervisory authorities and governmental working groups issued corporate governance best practice codes for listed companies during the nineties. In this paper, we used a unique database that allowed us to analyse the relationship between the level of compliance of the code of best...

The absence of investor reaction to the poor performance of mutual funds is a widely reported phenomenon. This article investigates the role of load costs as an explanation for the phenomenon and concludes that back-end load fees are an obstacle to reaction. We found evidence consistent with the...