Sovereign bond purchases and risk sharing arrangements: Sharing: Myth and Reality of the European QE
In March, the Eurosystem started to purchase on the secondary market euro-denominated bonds issued by governments, agencies and European institutions...
The macro-micro conflict
There has always been conflict between macro- and microeconomic regulation. Microeconomic policy reigns supreme during good times, and macro during...
Human Capital and International Portfolio Diversification: A Reappraisal
We study the implications of human capital hedging for international portfolio choice. First, we document that, at the household level, the degree of...
Volatility, financial crises and Minsky's hypothesis
Does low volatility in financial markets mean that another financial crisis is more likely? And should we be worried when everything is OK? This...
Endogenous Contractual Externalities
We study effort and risk-taking behaviour in an economy with a continuum of principal-agent pairs where each agent exerts costly hidden effort. When...
Can We Prove a Bank Guilty of Creating Systemic Risk? A Minority Report
Since increasing a bank's capital requirement to improve the stability of the financial system imposes costs upon the bank, a regulator should ideally...
Parameterized Games, Minimal Nash Correspondences, and Connectedness
Economics and game theory are replete with examples of parameterized games. We show that all minimal Nash payoff USCOs belonging to the Nash...
A Fixed Point Theorem for Measurable-Selection-Valued Correspondences Arising in Game Theory
We establish a new fixed point result for measurable-selection-valued correspondences with nonconvex and possibly disconnected values arising from the...
Stationary Markov Equilibria for K-Class Discounted Stochastic Games
For a discounted stochastic game with an uncountable state space and compact metric action spaces, we show that if the measurable-selection-valued...
Iceland, Greece and political hectoring
The Greek and the Icelandic crisis have much in common, not the least the heavy pressure from foreign countries and the hectoring from their public...
The Swiss Black Swan Bad Scenario: Is Switzerland Another Casualty of the Eurozone Crisis
Financial disasters to hedge funds, bank trading departments and individual speculative traders and investors seem to always occur because of non...
A proposed research and policy agenda for systemic risk
The long-running Greek crisis and China’s recent stock market crash are the latest threats to the stability of the global financial system. But as...
Are asset managers systemically important?
Some financial authorities have proposed designating asset managers as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). This column argues that...
Taming the Basel Leverage Cycle
Effective risk control must make a tradeoff between the microprudential risk of exogenous shocks to individual institutions and the macroprudential...
Insecure Debt
We analyse bank runs under fundamental and asset liquidity risk, adopting a realistic description of bank default. We obtain an unique run equilibrium...
Activist Funds, Leverage, and Procyclicality
We develop a dual-layered agency model to study blockholder monitoring by activist funds that compete for investor flow. Competition for flow affects...