Economic growth in Africa has long been disappointing. We document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We examine the factors that are associated with financial development in Africa...

The financial crisis that began in the fall of 2007 continues well into 2010, and has proved to be one of the longer lasting periods of financial disruption in decades. The policy responses to the crisis can be divided into three distinct phases. Phase I was a period of misdiagnosis in which...

Treatments of the future of hedge funds represent daunting tasks, not in the least because understanding hedge fund's past is still a subject of intense academic, industry practitioner, regulatory and legislative examination. Even the very definition of a hedge fund defies easy characterization,...

Living Wills should help the resolution of a cross-border financial institution in difficulties by clarifying and simplifying the legal structure, and making that legal structure commensurate with the functional business parts of the wider institution. An innovation could be to incorporate a...

Operational risk is now increasingly being considered an important financial risk and has been gaining importance similar to market and credit risk. In particular, in the banking regulation for large financial institutions it is required that operational risk be separately measured. The capital...

We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of U.S. discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies....

Using a novel data of institutional investors' bond holdings, we examine a transmission of the crisis of 2007-2008 from the securitized bond market to the corporate bond market via joint ownership of these bonds by investors. We posit that, ceteris paribus, corporate bonds held by investors with...

In this paper, we show (i) that the risk-return characteristics of our sample of 17 developed stock markets of the world have converged significantly toward each other during our study period 1974 - 2004, (ii) that the speed of convergence, however, varies greatly across individual markets,...

As domestic sources of outside finance are limited in many countries around the world, it is important to understand factors that influence whether foreign investors provide capital to a country's firms. This study uses a unique and comprehensive dataset of foreign holdings by U.S. investors...

This paper tests whether foreign equity exchange listings are associated with permanent valuation gains and examines how market and firm characteristics influence any valuation effects. Using a sample of 1256 listings placed in 24 countries, we find that much of the valuations gains to overseas...