We survey the extant theories on why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine historical evidence on the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly...

There is pervasive evidence that individuals invest primarily in domestic assets and thus hold poorly diversified portfolios. Empirical studies suggest that informational asymmetries may play a role in explaining the bias towards domestic assets. In contrast, theoretical studies based on...

This paper analyzes the optimal use of fiscal policy and sovereign debt repayment as signals in an asymmetric information environment. It shows that the presence of government private information could turn an optimal full-information countercyclical fiscal policy into a pro-cyclical one that...

Shimer (2005) showed that a standard search and matching model of the labor market fails to generate fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies of the magnitude observed in US data in response to shocks to average labor productivity of plausible magnitude. He also suggested that wage...

This paper develops a relatively simple method for computing the Markov Perfect Equilibria of dynamic games with asymmetric information (see Maskin and Tirole (1992, 2001)). We consider a class of dynamic games in which there is finite number of active players in each period, each characterized...