We propose a model in which firms involved in trading securities overinvest in financial expertise. Intermediaries or traders in the model meet and bargain over a financial asset. As in the bargaining model in Dang (2008), counterparties endogenously decide whether to acquire information, and...

This paper examines the implications of bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank risk and return using an international sample of 1334 banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2007 financial crisis. Expansion into non-interest income generating activities such as trading...

This paper constructs a macro-finance model with two types of borrowers: entrepreneurs who engage in productive activities and gamblers who play in lotteries. It links a central bank's interest rate policy to expected cash ows of both types of borrowers. Via this link we study how the...

We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market due to asymmetric information about counterparty risk. We allow for privately observed shocks to the distribution of asset risk across banks after the initial portfolio of liquid and illiquid investments is chosen. Our model...

The Great Recession is characterized by a GDP-decline that was unprecedented in the past decades. This paper discusses the implications of the Great Recession analyzing labor market data from 20 OECD countries. Comparing the Great Recession with the 1980s recession it is concluded that there is...

Abstract: This paper examines whether unemployment of non-western immigrant workers in the Netherlands was disproportionally affected by the Great Recession. We analyze unemployment data covering the period November 2007 to February 2013 finding that the Great Recession affected unemployment...

This paper examines the effects of policy coordination in a two-country world with endogenous growth and imperfect capital mobility.Public investment and a public consumption good are financed by a source-based capital-income tax. By comparing the cases in which countries do and do not...

This paper explores the international spillover effects of ageing through capital markets when countries have different pension systems.We use a two-country twoperiod overlapping-generations model, where the two countries only differ in their pension schemes.Two forms of population ageing are...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has surged in Latin America (LA) since the mid 1990s. European and North American FDI is of capital importance. We investigate the FDI-growth nexus in LA allowing for different source countries, regional hetero- geneity, interaction terms with FDI, and more than...

In this paper we estimate and interpret the factors that jointly determine bond returns of different maturities in the US, Germany and Japan.We analyze both currency-hedged and unhedged bond returns.For currency-hedged bond returns, we find that five factors explain 96.5% of the variation of...