This paper studies the early exercise behavior of individual investors in non-tradable German governmental putable bonds. Analyzing holding and exercise decisions of more than 220,000 individual investors at a single-account level over 13 years, our major findings are: (i) Individual investors use their early exercise right predominantly at times that are not optimal according to standard option pricing theory. (ii) Only very few attractive exercise opportunities are exploited over time. (iii) Both exercises and failure to exercise differ significantly among investor groups, are related to their personal characteristics as well as product characteristics and environmental circumstances, and are subject to cognitive biases. They tend to be persistent over time on the investor level. (iv) The demand by investors for liquidity and financial flexibility is a more important motive for investment and exercise than performance seeking.

This paper presents the first analysis of open-end leverage certificates on the German market. The major innovations of these certificates are twofold. First, issuers announce a price-setting formula according to which they are willing to buy and sell the certificates over time. Second, the product’s lifetime is potentially endless. Our main findings are that the price-setting formula is (i) designed to strongly favor the issuer and (ii) is consistent with the main outcome of the ‘life cycle hypothesis’ for structured financial products [Stoimenov, P.A., Wilkens, S., 2005. Are structured products ‘fairly’ priced? An analysis of the German market for equity-linked instruments. Journal of Banking and Finance 29, 2971–2993]. (iii) This holds for different product features and also in the presence of issuers’ credit risk and jump risk in the underlying.

This paper presents the first theoretical model of the profit maximizing price-setting policy for the issuers of exchange-traded retail certificates. Unlike previous theoretical microstructure models, the market considered is unique in that the market makers do not face significant inventory costs or risk from informed traders. The model derives the time structure of the optimal markups over a certificate’s fair theoretical value and its relationship with optimal spreads, unhedgeable risk faced by the issuer and investors’ buying and selling decisions. It shows that (i) the optimal markups decrease inter-temporally, (ii) issuers adjust the markups according to investors’ demand, (iii) unhedgeable risk results in higher markups and influences their time structure, (iv) the markups and the spread are negatively related. Using data from the German market for leverage certificates, we find strong empirical support for the model-derived hypotheses, except for (iv). We find spreads exhibit little variation and this suggests that markups and spreads are not substitute profit sources for issuers in this market.

This paper explores the extent to which interest risk exposure is priced into bank margins. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: First, we extend the Ho and Saunders (1981) model to capture interest rate risk and expected returns from maturity transformation. Banks price interest risk according to their individual exposure separately in loan and deposit intermediation fees, but reduce (increase) these charges for loans (deposits) when positive excess holding period returns from long-term exposures are expected. Second, we test the model-derived hypotheses not only for the commonly investigated net interest margin but also for interest income and expense margins separately in a sample encompassing the German universal banking sector between 2000 and 2009. Our results suggest that banks price their individual interest rate risk and corresponding expected excess holding period returns via the asset side into the net interest margin. For liabilities, we find that interest rate risk exposure is only priced in by smaller, local banks.

This paper examines the choices of retail investors in the market for structured financial products with a focus on implicit and explicit pricing components. We evaluate more than 72,000 single stock discount certificates on a daily basis from 2004 through 2008. The certificates are quoted an average of 0.58% above their fair value before the financial crisis, increasing to 1.24% during 2008. Although credit risk explains a major part (39%) of the certificates’ overpricing, we find that issuer default risk does not have any influence on investors’ product choices. Instead, retail investors are strongly influenced by irrational factors such as issuer and product familiarity. Finally, investors are found to make poor product choices (in terms of bid/ask spreads and markups over fair value), resulting in significant losses.