Opacity fosters price contagion that exacerbates the speculative cycles of bubbles and crashes that create financial instability. We find that banks with larger investments in opaque assets benefitted more from intra-industry revaluations associated with announcements of mergers in the period...

The financial crisis provides a natural experiment for testing theoretical predictions of the equity underwriter’s role following an initial public offering. Clients of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia saw their stock prices fall almost 5%, on average, on the day it...

We examine risk factors that explain daily changes in aggregate credit default swap (CDS) spreads before, during and after the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Based on the European iTraxx CDS index universe, we document time-variation in the significance of spread determinants. Before and after...

Against the backdrop of a severe financial crisis and extensive restructuring of the financial sector, we investigate the evolution and determinants of connections between firms and banks, and the impact of bank connections on corporate investment. Our study examines Thai non-financial companies...

This study explores equity market integration for five major ASEAN countries: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. The motivation emanated from the fact that these countries have been implementing financial reforms in their attempt to promote economic efficiency. By applying...

This paper carries out a counterfactual analysis of the Italian economy over the period 2008-2010, assuming that the global crisis hitting the economy never occurred. Under this circumstance, economic activity in Italy would have been higher by 6.5 percentage points at the end of 2010; crisis...

While a financial crisis must afflict people financially, its impacts on people's social life are unclear. Essentially, different theories expect different impacts of the financial crisis on people's social engagement. The present study thereby clarifies the effect by examining the experienced...

By employing Moody’s corporate default and rating transition data spanning the last 90years we explore how much capital banks should hold against their corporate loan portfolios to withstand historical stress scenarios. Specifically, we will focus on the worst case scenario over the...

Using 11years of monthly Italian bank-by-bank data, this paper correlates the bilateral amounts and the identity of each interbank borrower and lender with a long list of explanatory variables. The results show that interbank customer relationships, i.e. stable and strong relationships between...

We find that banks with more capital experienced more severe stock price declines during the recent financial crisis. We also find that banks with more capital experienced higher betas and stock volatility levels during the financial crisis. These results support the capital signaling...