This paper presents the first analysis of open-end leverage certificates on the German market. The major innovations of these certificates are twofold. First, issuers announce a price-setting formula according to which they are willing to buy and sell the certificates over time. Second, the...

This paper examines the risk-adjusted performance of mutual funds offered in Germany which exclusively invest in the 'rather new' capital market segment of euro-denominated investment grade corporate bonds. The funds are evaluated employing a single-index model and several multi-index and...

This paper analyzes the robustness of the standardized framework proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2004b) to quantify the interest rate risk of banks. We generalize this framework and study the change in the estimated level of interest rate risk if the strict assumptions of...

This paper proposes a new method of estimating the interest rate risk of banks from the perspective of bank outsiders. The key innovation is the inclusion of time series of accounting-based data instead of using only the latest available reports to estimate the maturity structure of banks. Using...

This paper analyzes optimal hedge ratios for foreign exchange (FX) rate risk of companies. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: (i) We present a theoretical two-period regret model that allows us to analyze the determinants of the optimal hedge ratio given the outcome of past hedging...

This paper studies the magnitude and determinants of interest rate risk (IRR) of listed U.S. bank holding companies. As our first contribution, we test whether banks avoid exposures to IRR as prescribed in classic bank hedging literature. To do so, we use a state space model and Kalman filter...

This paper examines the choices of retail investors in the market for structured financial products with a focus on implicit and explicit pricing components. We evaluate more than 72,000 single stock discount certificates on a daily basis from 2004 through 2008. The certificates are quoted an...

This paper presents the first theoretical model of the profit maximizing price-setting policy for the issuers of exchange-traded retail certificates. Unlike previous theoretical microstructure models, the market considered is unique in that the market makers do not face significant inventory...

This paper is the first to measure individual investors' realized risk-adjusted performance in structured financial products, which represent one of the key financial innovations in recent times. Based on a large database of trades and portfolio holdings for 10,652 retail investors in discount...