We identify the determinants of all German banks' sovereign debt exposures between 2005 and 2013 and test for the implications of these exposures for bank risk. Larger, more capital market affine, and less capitalised banks hold more sovereign bonds. Around 15% of all German banks never hold...

The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper studies household stock market participation and trading behavior in 2007 - 09, a period that saw a major stock market downswing. The stock market participation rate fell after the market crash. We find evidence that less-educated households,...

This paper focuses on two methods for optimum portfolio selection. We compare Mean-Variance method with Mean-VaR method by the means of investment simulation, based on Czech financial market data from turbulent market periods of the year 2007 and the year 2008. We compare both strategies, basing...

The credit crisis and the following sovereign debt crisis during 2007 and 2012 led to an increasing volatility of European corporate bond credit spreads. European investment grade credit spreads rose in 2007 and 2008 from 50 BP to over 350 BP. In the years after the credit spreads declined to...

This paper uses the market-standard Gaussian copula model to show that fair spreads on CDO tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly-rated corporate bonds. It implies that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing, which is surprising given their central role in structured...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, the discussion on the nature of runs and on the stabilizing role of liquidity holdings has intensified. This paper explores the cash management conducted by German open-end equity funds for the period between 2005 and 2010. Since ownership structures...

This paper compares two classes of models that allow for additional channels of correlation between asset returns: regime switching models with jumps and models with contagious jumps. Both classes of models involve a hidden Markov chain that captures good and bad economic states. The distinctive...

Prices of real and financial assets fell substantially in the UK during 2008-09. The fourth wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was in the field throughout this 'financial crisis'. We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of the crisis on the...