This paper studies the role that market structure plays in affecting the diffusion of electronic banking. Electronic banking (and electronic commerce more generally) reduces the cost of performing many types of transactions for firms. The full benefits for firms from adoption, however, only...

The primary objective of this paper is to compare a variety of joint models of the term structure of interest rates and the macroeconomy. To this end, we consider six alternative approaches. Three of these models follow from the work of Diebold and Li (2003) with a generalization in Bolder...

Zero-coupon interest rates are the fundamental building block of fixed-income mathematics, and as such have an extensive number of applications in both finance and economics. The risk-free government zero-coupon term structure is, however, not directly observable and needs to be generated from...

Modelling term-structure dynamics is an important component in measuring and managing the exposure of portfolios to adverse movements in interest rates. Model selection from the enormous term-structure literature is far from obvious and, to make matters worse, a number of recent papers have...

Since the contribution of Kydland and Prescott (1977), it is well known that the optimal Ramsey policy is time inconsistent. In a series of recent contributions, Woodford (2003) proposes a new methodology to circumvent this problem, namely the timeless perspective solution. However, one main...

The authors empirically analyze the price-setting behaviour of the major Canadian banks in the residential mortgage market over the period 19912007. They use weekly posted prices of the major mortgage providers to study the degree of competition in mortgage price setting. Their results suggest...

The author provides an overview of carbon markets and explains how emissions trading can be important in encouraging the reduction of CO2 emissions in an efficient manner. He describes the key steps in establishing a cap-and-trade system, and reviews the European experiences with emissions...

Consumers often purchase more than one differentiated product, assembling a portfolio, which might potentially affect substitution patterns of demand and, as a consequence, oligopolistic firms’ pricing strategies. This paper studies such consumers’ portfolio considerations by developing a...

This paper examines the sale of durable goods by a monopolist in a stochastic partil equilibrium setting. It analyzes the responses of prices and output to various types of shocks and notes the differences with non-durable goods and competitive markets. It shows that behavior in this model with...