Pension schemes have a significant influence on the saving and consumption decisions of households. Similarly, contributions to pension arrangements are substantial expenditures for national governments and also for corporations, depending on the prevailing pension system. Beyond this, pension...

India has an estimated 26,000 startups, making it the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, recording consolidated inflows of over $36 billion in the past 3 years with 26 "unicorns" - startups valued over $1 billion. The Indian startup ecosystem has expanded quite rapidly mainly through...

Financial innovation in the form of new delivery channels, products, and providers has helped push out the frontier of access to finance and thus increase the bankable and banked population. Mobile money and crowdfunding platforms are prime examples for this. The same financial innovation has...

The money market rates in the United States exhibit various calendar patterns that are grounded in institutional and regulatory factors. In this paper, we document a new regularity in the overnight fed funds market. Specifically, we identify patterns of decreased volatility along with consistent...

An asset is money-like if investors have no incentives to acquire costly private information on the underlying collateral. However, privately provided money-like assets-like prime money market fund (MMF) shares-are prone to runs if investors suddenly start to question the value of the...

We investigate the trading of corporate bonds on alternative trading system (ATS) platforms. We draw a key distinction between request-for-quote (RFQ) and electronic communication network (ECN) trading protocols, which balance investors' preference for immediacy and anonymity. Trades on ATS...

This paper characterizes the run behavior of sophisticated (institutional) and unsophisticated (retail) investors by studying the runs on prime money market funds (MMFs) of March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. For both U.S. and European institutional prime MMFs, the runs were...

Citing consumer protection concerns, New Hampshire – along with three other states – recently banned payday lending by implementing an APR cap on small loans. New Hampshire presents a compelling quasi-experiment: its neighbors already had a payday loan ban inplace. Hence, New Hampshire...

Volatility is one of the most important factors of investment decisions. Unexpected information forces the investor to trade abnormally in the market which in turn affects the volatility of the market. But this kind of trading behavior has a different impact on the different market segments....

This paper investigates how balance sheet opacity affects banks' risk-taking behavior. We measure bank balance sheet opacity according to two metrics: the ratio of available-for-sale (AFS) securities and the ratio of off-balance sheet items. We show that balance sheet opacity is positively...