I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks’ pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs’ beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the most optimistic CEOs experienced 20 percentage points higher real estate loan growth, and 15 percentage...

This paper presents evidence that reductions in mortgage interest rates associated with prepayment penalties are greater for riskier borrowers, as measured by mortgage type, credit scores, and local incomes and education levels. This is consistent with an efficiency view that, by reducing the reclassification risk faced by lenders, prepayment penalties can be welfareimproving. Additional findin...

Why do asset price bubbles continue to appear in various markets? This paper provides an overview of recent literature on bubbles, with significant attention given to behavioral models and rational models with frictions. Unlike the standard rational models, the new literature is able to model the common characteristics of historical bubble episodes and offer insights for how bubbles are initiat...

This paper aims at testing the influence of Subprime Crisis on Chinese stock market returns. By means of newly proposed time series spatial analysis methodology, we investigate the dominance behavior of daily returns on both Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Component Index between before and after the crisis. Little spatial dominance could be found, even consi...

This paper explores long wave theory, including Kondratieff’s theory of cycles in production and relative prices; Kuznets’ theory of cycles arising from infrastructure investments; Schumpeter`s theory of cycles due to waves of technological innovation; Goodwin`s theory of cyclical growth based on employment and wage share dynamics; Keynes – Kaldor – Kalecki demand and investment oriented theori...

We show whether central clearing of a particular class of derivatives lowers counterparty risk. For plausible cases, adding a central clearing counterparty (CCP) for a class of derivatives such as credit default swaps reduces netting efficiency, leading to an increase in average exposure to counterparty default. Further, clearing different classes of derivatives in separate CCPs always increase...