The main purpose of this paper is to take a step towards building a theory of financial system architecture. We begin with basic assumptions about the types of primitive agents and the nature of informational asymmetries in the economy, and then provide a theory that explains which agents...

Returns in financial assets show consistent excess kurtosis, indicating the presence of large fluctuations not predicted by Gaussian models. Mandelbrot (1963) first proposed the idea that price changes distributed according to a Lévy stable law. The unique feature of Lévy-stable distributions...

We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was higher and - contrary to expectations- access to...

This paper re-examines the validity of the Expectation Hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of US repo rates ranging in maturity from overnight to three months. We extend the work of Longstaff (2000a) in two directions: (i) we implement statistical tests designed to increase test power in this...

We provide a detailed account of the portfolio of Italian households and its evolution, using repeated cross-sectional and panel data drawn from the 1989-95 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We offer an in-depth description of the lifetime pattern of asset holdings and their...

In this paper we document the cyclical properties of U.S. firms' financial flows. Equity payouts are procyclical and debt payouts are countercyclical. We develop a model with explicit roles for debt and equity financing and explore how the observed dynamics of real and financial variables are...

This paper investigates the empirical relation between spot and forward implied volatility in foreign exchange. We formulate and test the forward volatility unbiasedness hypothesis, which may be viewed as the volatility analogue to the extensively researched hypothesis of unbiasedness in forward...

This paper analyses the role of asset prices in comparison to other factors, in particular exchange rates, as a driver of the US trade balance. It employs a Bayesian structural VAR model that requires imposing only a minimum of economically meaningful sign restrictions. We find that equity...

People choose where to live and how much to invest in housing. Traditionally, the first decision has been the domain of spatial economics, while the second has been analyzed in finance. Spatial asset pricing is an attempt to combine equilibrium concepts from both disciplines. In the finance...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....