In recent history, financial markets worldwide experienced severe turmoil due to the subprime crisis originating from the practice of US mortgage banks to securitise loans given especially to subprime borrowers. In the same crisis, several distressed banks were bailed out by states with even...

We propose a novel corporate social responsibility (CSR) index that captures various aspects of an insurer's internal and external CSR activities. We first show that insurers worldwide have significantly increased their CSR activities with the average index value almost doubling between 2006 and...

Do catastrophe bonds increase or decrease the exposure and contribution to systemic risk of the issuing insurance companies? And if such issues influence systemic stability, what design features of the bond and characteristics of the issuing insurer cause catastrophe bond issues to destabilize...

We propose a new set of formal backtests for VaR-forecasts that significantly improve upon existing backtesting procedures. Our new test of unconditional coverage can be used for both one-sided and two-sided testing, which leads to a significantly increased power. Second, we stress the...

We study symmetry properties of bivariate copulas. For this, we introduce an order of asymmetry, as well as measures of asymmetry which are monotone in that order. In an empirical study, we illustrate that asymmetric dependence structures do indeed occur in financial market data and discuss its...

We study the effects of innovations in financial technology by banks on local competition for deposits and credit supply. To identify the causal effect of financial technology on deposits and lending, we exploit the geographic heterogeneity in human capital available to bank headquarters to...

In this paper, we study the determinants of the systemic importance of banks and insurers during the financial crisis. We investigate the methodology of regulators to identify global systemically important financial institutions and find that firm size is the only significant predictor of the...

This paper proposes the use of outlier detection methods from robust statistics and copula goodness-of-fit tests to identify components of mixture copulas. We first consider simulated data samples in which the true dependence structure is given by a mixture of two parametric copulas: one copula...

This paper presents novel empirical evidence on the success of efforts by P2P lending platforms to limit adverse selection using a unique sample of 5,385 credit transactions on the internet platform Prosper.com. The results of our regressions on the probability of a credit bid’s successful...

We introduce a new stochastic order for the tail dependence between random variables. We then study different measures of tail dependence which are monotone in the proposed order, thereby extending various known tail dependence coefficients from the literature. We apply our concepts in an...