The foreign currency market in a small open economy, like Israel, plays a major role in fiscal and monetary policy decisions, through its effects on the financial markets and the real economy. In this paper we explore the liquidity and efficiency in three related foreign exchange options markets...

This study examines the infuence of US banks' revenue diversification on profitability, equity capital, and credit risk by size. By a simple decomposition of Return On Capital (ROC) I show how popular revenue diversification measures affect both the ROC and risk-adjusted ROC. I find substantial...

Over the last fifty years, increasingly sophisticated risk measurement and management techniques have revolutionized the field of finance. More recently, the globalization of financial markets and policy changes in the regulation of financial institutions have impacted upon how commercial banks...

This paper examines the incentive of a bank's owners and manager to increase the level of assets risk if bank deposits are insured. The model consists of three players: a public insurer (e.g., the FDIC), the bank's owners (owners), and its manager (manager). Empirical evidence has shown that the...

This paper suggests a methodology for identifying speculators in FX (foreign exchange) markets. A player is identified as a speculator only if his speculative characteristics are extreme compared with those of other players and his influence on exchange rates on outlying days is significant....

The study examines how 166 U.S. banks compensated their top management teams (top 4-5 executives in each bank) during 1993-1996. We observe two tiers of compensation in the executive suite: CEO and the rest. CEOs are paid more, especially in performance contingent compensation. The weight of...

We document significant intra-year seasonality in outliers of S&P500 daily rates of return. Controlling for outliers in dummy regressions reveals that both the January and Monday effects turn from insignificant to highly significant. Mean daily return on January doubles and becomes significantly...

AbstractThe foreign currency market in a small open economy, like Israel, plays a major role in fiscal and monetary policy decisions, through its effects on the financial markets and the real economy. This has become even more evident in the recent financial crisis. In this paper we explore the...