Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price....

We show that binomial economies with financial assets are an informative and tractable model to study endogenous leverage and collateral equilibrium: endogenous leverage can be highly volatile, but it is always easy to compute. The possibility of default can have a dramatic effect on...

In this paper we examine sovereign bond yield spread (BYS) spillovers between Euro zone countries during a turbulent period encompassing both the global financial crisis and the Euro zone debt crisis. Using the VAR-based spillover index approach of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and impulse response...

The globalisation process has led to the stimulation of international economic and financial relations by extensive capital movements. The global financial crisis has severely affected all segments of the capital market, its effects being felt especially on the emerging markets. This paper aims...

We present a model with leverage and margin constraints that vary across investors and time. We find evidence consistent with each of the model's five central predictions: (1) Because constrained investors bid up high-beta assets, high beta is associated with low alpha, as we find empirically...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...

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...

Using the pandemic as a laboratory, we show that asset markets assign a time- varying price to firms' disaster risk exposure. In 2020 the cross-section of realized and expected stock returns reflected firms' different exposure to the pandemic, as measured by their vulnerability to social...

The literature on leverage until now shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility. This paper suggests a reason why bad news is more often than not associated with higher future volatility....

We study endogenous leverage in a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets. We prove that in any binary tree leverage emerges in equilibrium at the maximum level such that VaR = 0, so there is no default in equilibrium, provided that agents get no utility from holding the collateral....