Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending emerged as an early innovation of the fintech revolution. As an online platform, it has served as a marketplace to allocate capital from a group of individual lenders to retail borrowers without a traditional intermediary, such as a bank. The initial promise of P2P...

We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the payment behavior of delinquent borrowers. Borrowers who speak with a randomly assigned bank agent are significantly more likely to successfully resolve the delinquency relative to borrowers who do not speak with a bank agent. Call...

We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the payment behavior of delinquent borrowers. Borrowers who speak with a randomly assigned bank agent are significantly more likely to successfully resolve the delinquency relative to borrowers who do not speak with a bank agent. Call...

We revisit the limited stock market participation puzzle leveraging a qualitative research approach that is commonly used in many social sciences, but much less so in finance or economics. We conduct in-depth interviews of stock market participants and non-participants in Germany, a high-income...

We measure a country's growth opportunities by investigating how its industry mix is priced in global capital markets, using price earnings ratios of global industry portfolios. We derive three sets of empirical results. First, these exogenous growth opportunities strongly predict future changes...

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many developing countries, the level of segmentation is still significant. In contrast to previous research, we characterize the factors that account for variation...

We use industry valuation differentials across European countries to study the impact of membership in the European Union as well as the Eurozone on both economic and financial integration. In integrated markets, discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward-looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country’s US dollar debt and an equivalent US Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

At a time of historic challenges to the viability of the Eurozone, we assess the contribution of the EU and the Euro to equity market integration in Europe. We use a simple and essentially model free measure of bilateral market segmentation: two countries are segmented if there is a wide...