Global financial regulators are currently reflecting on the nature of the insurance business. Specifically, they are trying to classify insurance into ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ activities, and to distinguish them from ‘non-insurance’ activities. Subsequently, they will seek...

It is often disregarded that the euro is first of all a public good based on common institutions such the European Central Bank, the Governing Council and a network for executing transactions etc. Establishing a public good is fundamentally different from trade in private goods. A public good...

This paper studies financial statement information from the 50 largest international oil and gas companies during 1992 to 2011 and evaluates their relation to market values. In particular, we examine how this relationship is affected by accounting method choice (successful efforts versus full...

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of inequalities and economic convergence on the efficient discount rate, in the absence of any risk-sharing scheme. We consider an economy in which the initial consumption level and the distribution of consumption growth are heterogeneous. The...

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two–sector heterogeneous–agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice with financial constraints and idiosyncratic risks. We discuss the macroeconomic and distributional effects of financial...

DSGE-models have become important tools of analysis not only in academia but increasingly in the board rooms of central banks. The success of these models has much to do with the coherence of the intellectual framework it provides. The limitations of these models come from the fact that they...

Adding a stage of signal acquisition to the expected utility model shows that Bayesian updating results in a well defined law of demand for financial information when asset return distributions are conjugate priors to signals such as in the gamma-Poisson case. Signals have a positive marginal...

We study the properties of generalized stochastic gradient (GSG) learning in forward-looking models. We examine how the conditions for stability of standard stochastic gradient (SG) learning both differ from and are related to E-stability, which governs stability under least squares learning. SG...

We study the effects of overconfidence in a two-period investment-decision agency setting. Under common priors, agent risk aversion implies inefficiently low first-period investment. In our model, principal and agent disagree about the profitability of the investment decision conditional on a...

A rational-expectations equilibrium with positive demand for financial information does exist under fully revealing asset price - contrary to a wide-held conjecture. Generalizing the common additive signal-return model with CARA utility to the family of distributions with moment generating...