In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

We cross-sectionally analyze the presence of aggregated hidden depth and trade volume in the S&P 500 and identify its key determinants. We find that the spread is the main predictor for a stock's hidden dimension, both in terms of traded and posted liquidity. Our findings moreover suggest that...

We find evidence that hedge funds significantly manipulate stock prices on critical reporting dates. We document that stocks held by hedge funds experience higher returns on the last day of the quarter, followed by a reversal the next day. For example, the stocks in the top quartile of hedge...

In this paper we 'update' the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second, it is...

We present evidence that the growth of U.S.-dollar-denominated banking sector liabilities forecasts appreciations of the U.S. dollar, both in-sample and out-of-sample, against a large set of foreign currencies. We provide a theoretical foundation for a funding liquidity channel in a global...

This paper estimates the funding advantage afforded by the joint liability scheme to German Landesbanken. The advantage is estimated by computing the difference between Moody's baseline credit assessment (BCA), representing the stand-alone rating, and the adjusted BCA incorporating group support...

Based on an empirical analysis of European corporations, we investigate the impact of sovereign risk on the pricing of corporate credit risk. In our paper, we show that sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) are positively correlated with corresponding corporate CDS spreads and are a significant...

We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund's NAV closing time from the best-fit market...

As witnessed during the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis, the dependency on short-term foreign capital for long-term investment made the region vulnerable to the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Rapid capital outflows not only caused the collapse of the financial system but also a sharp...