The classical doctrine of the Lender of Last Resort, elaborated by Thornton (1802) and Bagehot (1873), asserts that the Central Bank should lend to “illiquid but solvent” banks under certain conditions. Several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete: when interbank markets are...

We study optimal portfolio choices for an agent with the aim of maximising utility from terminal wealth within a market with liquidity costs. Under some mild conditions, we show the existence of optimal portfolios and that the marginal utility of the optimal terminal wealth serves as a change of...

We examine whether the information contained in social media (Twitter & Facebook) and web search queries (Google) influences financial markets. Using a multivariate system and focussing on Eurozone’s peripheral countries, the GIIPS (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), we show that...

This paper reveals the underlying market’s preferences over the on going Euro area sovereign debt crisis. It builds on a loss function with reference to the ‘basis’, the difference between the spread over swap and Credit Default Swap (CDS) for sovereign bonds. This loss function is general...

Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a welldefined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...

This paper is a theoretical study of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the presence of an endogenous role of bank capital. The basic framework is a standard Dynamic New Keynesian model with price stickiness modified so as firms as well as banks face endogenous financial frictions...

This article examines the 2007 banking crisis from an interdisciplinary and, in particular, social constructivist perspective to identify its structural and systemic causes. After presenting and explaining a wide meta-theoretical framework that can accommodate different understandings of...

This paper investigates the relationship between infation uncertainty and investment using a panel of loan-level data from small businesses. Micro-level data makes it possible to study phenomena that are obscured in country or industry aggregates. The data show that periods of increased...

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financial regulation to studythe optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that the new architecture should revolvearound the following principles: (i) banking, securities and insurance supervision should befurther integrated;...

The paper investigates the relationship between underground activities and financial deepening. The access to external finance requires entrepreneurs to disclose credible information through formal documentation. This requirement may be impossible to oblige to for many informal producers who...