Contributions published at Department of Banking and Finance (Pablo Koch Medina)

This thesis analyses the current situation of the hedge fund industry to predict its survival in the coming years. The focus is to understand the problems that hedge funds face today and whether there are positive aspects in connection to a hedge fund investment. The thesis starts with a historical overview of the industry and continues by presenting its clientele, its strategies, and the fee structure used by hedge funds. It continues by comparing hedge funds with passive investment alternatives, which are extremely popular today. The comparison is qualitative and quantitative, analysing the last 20 years using data from Bloomberg. The last chapter dives into several topics that influence hedge funds and their relationship with the public. The results suggest that hedge funds can offer their clients value that goes further than just returns, such as great diversification effects and the ability to invest in complicated financial structures and products, proving that there are multiple reasons why an investment in them can be a good idea. This, combined with many external reports that have shown a growing trend for hedge funds in the last couple of years, proves that they will continue to be an important part of the market in the future. The thesis shows various points that should be further developed by hedge funds, such as the fee structure and the relationship with the public

This thesis investigates the Non-proportional thinking (NPT) predictions regarding investors’ behavior in the European stock market. NPT predicts that lower-priced stocks experience more extreme abnormal returns compared to higher-priced stocks due to investors thinking in nominal rather than percentage terms when evaluating the impact of new information. Evidence of a negative relationship between the nominal share price level and abnormal returns around earnings announcement dates is found, however, the extent of engagement in NPT behaviors is estimated to be close to zero for the period and sample under investigation.

Climate change will impact current and future generations in different regions very differently. This paper develops a large-scale, annually calibrated, multi-region, overlapping generations model of climate change to study its heterogeneous effects across space and time. We model the relationship between carbon emissions and the global average temperature based on the latest climate science. Predicated average global temperature is used to determine, via pattern-scaling, region-specific temperatures and damages. Our main focus is determining the carbon policy that delivers present and future mankind the highest uniform percentage welfare gains – arguably the policy with the highest chance of global adoption. Damages from climate change are positive for all regions apart from Russia and Canada, with India and South Asia Pacific suffering the most. The optimal policy is implemented via a time-varying global carbon tax plus region- and generation-specific net transfers. Uniform welfare improving carbon policy can materially limit global emissions, dramatically shorten the use of fossil fuels, and raise the welfare of all current and future agents by over four percent. Unfortunately, the pursuit of carbon policy by individual regions, even large ones, makes only a limited difference. However, coalitions of regions, particularly ones including China, can materially limit carbon emissions.

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Quelques jours après la reprise de la deuxième banque suisse par la première, les élus forcent une session parlementaire extraordinaire. Prise de température des intéressés avant les 11 et 13 avril prochains.

Die Politik fordert die Boni der CS-Topmanager zurück. Im «Club» machen Finanzexpertinnen und Juristen den Reality-Check: Ist es rechtlich möglich, Boni zurückzufordern?

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Rembobiner le film de 35 ans de finance casino permet de comprendre pourquoi on en est arrivé là. La débâcle de Credit Suisse est aussi celle des personnalités politiques et académiques, écrit le professeur zurichois Marc Chesney.

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La drammatica acquisizione di Credit Suisse da parte di UBS ha concentrato tutti i rischi del salvataggio sulle spalle di una sola banca svizzera. Questo preoccupa non poco alcune persone nella Confederazione.

The spectacular takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS has concentrated all the risks on the shoulders of a single Swiss bank. This operation makes some people very nervous in Switzerland.

The dramatic takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS has concentrated all the risk of the rescue onto the shoulders of one Swiss bank. That makes some people in Switzerland very nervous.

We study the impact of the public disclosure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings on information asymmetry. Our empirical results show, that consistent with our theoretical predictions derived from the strategic information asymmetry model, ESG ratings contain private information. Stocks for which an ESG rating becomes publicly available exhibit a significant reduction in their levels of information asymmetry. This finding is likely to be causal. The results persist in robustness tests in a difference-in-difference setting using a propensity-score-matched control group.