This paper deals with the economics of Bitcoins in two ways. First, it broadens the discussion on how to capture Bitcoins using economic terms. Center stage in this analysis take the discussion of some unique characteristics of this market as well as the comparison of Bitcoins and gold. Second,...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

In a standard financial market model with asymmetric information with a finite number N of risk-averse informed traders, competitive rational expectations equilibria provide a good approximation to strategic equilibria as long as N is not too small: equilibrium prices in eachsituation converge...

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model with long-term investors. We argue that the fact that prices can score worse or better than consensus opinion in predicting the fundamentals is a product of...

We examine how donor government ideology influences the composition of foreign aid flows. We use data for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960-2009 and distinguish between multilateral and bilateral aid, grants and loans, recipient characteristics such as income and political institutions,...

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...