infonet-economy

This paper combines the concept of market sidedness with excess option demand (changes in open interest) to solve the empirical challenge of separating directional from uninformed trading motives in widely available, unsigned options data. Our measure of options market sidedness persistently predicts the sign and strength of stock returns. Trading strategies conditional on the…

This paper shows how to design incentive-based capital requirements that would prevent the bank from manufacturing tail risk. In the model, the senior bank manager may have incentives to engage in tail risk. Bank shareholders can prevent the manager from taking on tail risk via the optimal incentive compensation contract. To induce shareholders to implement this contract, capital…

The paper by Presbitero, Udell and Zazzaro (henceforth, PUZ) aims to investigate whether the financial crisis that in Italy really “hit” after Lehman Brothers in September 2008 actually led to a credit crunch there and which types of firms suffered most. PUZ start from the quarterly editions of a monthly survey of about 3,800 Italian manufacturing firms (by ISAE, now ISTAT) to…

We identify the effects of monetary policy on bank risk-taking with an exhaustive credit register containing loan contracts and applications since 1984. We separate the compositional changes in the credit supply from the demand, firm and bank balance-sheet channels by accounting for both observed and unobserved time-varying firm and bank heterogeneity through time*firm and time*bank…

In a model where banks play an active role in monitoring borrowers, we analyze the impact of securitization on bankers’ incentives across different macroeconomic scenarios. We show that securitization can be part of the optimal financing scheme for banks, provided banks retain an equity tranche in the sold loans to maintain proper incentives. In economic downturns however…

We study the effect of bank loan announcements on the borrowing firms' bond and equity prices. Our sample consists of 896 loan deals signed between 1997 to 2003 involving 364 different US firms. We report the first comprehensive evidence that also firm bond prices react to bank loan announcements. Using a two-day event window, we find significant abnormal bond credit spreads…

Previous psychological investigations revealed that sacred values (SVs; the belief that certain values are nonsubstitutable and may not be traded off, in particular, against secular economic values) modulates moral decision making depending on the type of SV infringement involved. Extending this research, we compared neurofunctional correlates determined from fMRI measurements during…

We investigate the suitability of securitization as an alternative to reinsurance for the purpose of transferring natural catastrophe risk. We characterize the conditions under which one or the other form of risk transfer dominates using a setting in which reinsurers and traders in financial markets produce costly information about catastrophes. Such information is useful to insurers…