In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a new policy paradigm has emerged in which old-fashioned policies such as capital controls and other government distortions have become part of the standard policy toolkit (the so-called macro-prudential policies). On the wave of this seemingly...

After liberalizing international transactions of financial assets, many countries experience large swings in asset prices, capital flows, and aggregate production. This paper studies how the adjustment to capital account liberalization depends upon the degree of development of a domestic...

In this paper we study whether policy makers should wait to intervene until a financial crisis strikes or rather act in a preemptive manner. We study this question in a relatively simple dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which crises are endogenous events induced by the presence of...

This paper analyses whether sovereign default episodes can be seen as contingencies of optimal international lending contracts. The model considers a small open economy with capital accumulation and without commitment to repay debt. Taking first order approximations of Bellman equations, I...

Sometimes regulators become experimenters: they try ideas out before implementing them, put novel schemes to the test in order to predict their likely impact, or conduct pilot programmes before executing new policies. Regulators find experiments very expedient, as they allow them to forecast the...

The purpose of our work is to explore contagious financial crises. To this end, we use simplified, thus numerically solvable, versions of our general model [Goodhart, Sunirand and Tsomocos (2003)]. The model incorporates heterogeneous agents, banks and endogenous default, thus allowing various...

We propose a model in which assets with identical cash flows can trade at different prices. Agents enter into an infinite-horizon, steady-state market to establish long or short positions. Both the spot and the asset-lending market operate through search. Short-sellers can endogenously...

Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their opening and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the...

This paper examines to what extent reputational concerns give rating agencies incentives to reveal information. It demonstrates that, in a simple model in which a rating agency has public and private information about a project, it may ignore private information and even contradict public...

This paper examines the determinants of inside spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily inside spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes),...