Our basic premise is that fund managers performance is related to superior information about an asset payoff. We investigate the relationship between managerial skills and trading behavior within a two-period rational expectation equilibrium (REE) model where agents trade on private information...

The financial crisis of 2007-9 has sparked keen interest in models of financial frictions and their impact on macro activity. Most models share the feature that borrowers suffer a contraction in the quantity of credit. However, the evidence suggests that although bank lending to firms declines...

How do European stocks react to rating actions issued by Rating Agencies using a Pan-European sample of more than 500 credit rating changes released by Moody's in the period 2002-2007 we show that the reaction to rating changes is asymmetric. Downgrades negatively affect equity value and...

In a market with informationally connected traders, the dynamics of volume, price informativeness, price-volatility, and price-impacts are severely affected by the number of information linkages every trader experiences with his neighbors. We show that in the presence of information linkages...

We investigate the effects of forward looking behavior in technology adoption. The setup is an overlapping generation model where agents choose between two alternative networks taking in consideration both the installed base and the expected base. The latter element is the distinctive feature of...

Tradable emission permits share many characteristics with financial assets. As on financial markets, speculators are likely to be active on large markets for emission permits such as those developing under the Kyoto Protocol. We show how the presence of speculators on a market for emission...

We develop a dynamic trading game in which fundamental insiders coexist with non-fundamental speculators. Non-fundamental speculators possess superior information about the future noise trades and are able to make sharper inference about the fundamental value with respect to the market maker. We...

We investigate the effect of board connections on the debt structure of private firms. Using a comprehensive panel data set from Italy, our empirical evidence indicates that independent directors who sit on multiple boards facilitate firms' access to external debt, mostly in the form of trade...

We empirically examine how corporate cash holdings relate to debt structure, that is, the fraction of bond financing. We find that the relation between cash holdings and bond financing is U-shaped in the cross-section of firms. That is, firms that do not use bond financing or those that are...

As of this writing in June 2016, the markets are predicting Venezuela to be on the brink of default. On June 1, 2016, the 6 month CDS contract traded at about 7000bps which translates into a likelihood of default of over 90%. Our interest in the Venezuelan crisis is that its outstanding...