Focusing on the art market, where auction houses act as brokers between art sellers and buyers, we investigate whether more experienced brokers achieve better performance as information providers. We use a unique data set of auctions of Italian paintings in various houses around the world, and...

Supranational institutions, academics and market analysts have increasingly questioned the reliability of bank risk-weighted assets (RWAs), a cornerstone of the system of minimum capital ratios designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. In fact, significant differences can be found...

As the size of the art market increases and a growing number of investors are attracted by the high returns, the amount and quality of information available to market participants becomes increasingly relevant, especially for less experienced investors. One of the most relevant information...

We use a panel data set of large listed European banks to evaluate the effect of the usage of internal ratings-based (IRB) models on bank opacity. We find that a more intensive implementation of these models is associated with lower absolute forecast error and disagreement among analysts about...

Theories suggest that asset encumbrance, the ring-fencing of certain assets for protected debtholders, can affect banks’ risk taking and lead to funding instability. We test these hypotheses using a unique, hand-collected dataset on outstanding covered bonds issued by a sample of listed...