Eine der herausragenden Entwicklungen auf den internationalen Finanzmarkten in den letzten Jahren ist die Institutionalisierung, d. h. die zunehmende Delegation privater Ersparnisse an professionelle Kapitalanleger - den institutionellen Investoren. Darunter sind private...

Since private equity investments are not publicly traded, a key issue in measuring investment risks of institutional private equity investors arises from a careful measurement of investment returns in the first place. Prices of private equity investments are typically observed at low frequency...

We provide a model of bookbuilding in IPOs, in which the issuer can choose to ration shares. We consider two allocation rules. Under share dispersion, before informed investors submit their bids, they know that, in the aggregate, winning bidders will receive only a fraction of their demand. We...

The paper is devoted to an analysis of the Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance (TSCG), also known as the "Fiscal Compact" Treaty signed between the EU member states in 2012. We argue than the TSCG, instead of helping to "repair" the institutional failures on which the Euro and the...

This paper discusses the role that finance plays in promoting the capital development of the economy, with particular emphasis on the current situation of the United States and the United Kingdom. We define both "finance" and "capital development" very broadly. We begin with the observation that...

The Global Financial Crisis as well as the Eurozone Banking and Sovereign Debt Crisis revealed deficiencies in bank capital regulation which made banks vulnerable to stress in interbank markets as well as to stress in sovereign debt markets. Deterio-rating banks' balance sheet quality weakened...

This paper examines how cross-border differences in the stringency of bank regulations affect U.S. banks' international activities. The analysis relies on a unique bank-level dataset on the globally most active U.S. banks' balance sheet as well as their cross-border, foreign affiliate lending...

Financial contagion and systemic risk measures are commonly derived from conditional quantiles by using imposed model assumptions such as a linear parametrization. In this paper, we provide model free measures for contagion and systemic risk which are independent of the specifcation of...

This paper provides a new interpretation of the early rise of rating agencies in the United States (initially known as Mercantile Agencies). We explain this American exceptionality through an inductive approach that revisits the conventional parallel with the UK. In contrast with earlier...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of "Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?" by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial support...