In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

AMS classifications: 47H10; 54H25; 55M20; 90C33; 91B50

AMS classifications: 47H10; 54H25; 55M20; 90C26; 90C33; 91B50;

Tucker's well-known combinatorial lemma states that for any given symmetric triangulation of the n-dimensional unit cube and for any integer labeling that assigns to each vertex of the triangulation a label from the set f§1;§2; ¢ ¢ ¢ ;§ng with the property that antipodal vertices on the...

In this paper we study the existence problem of a zero point of a function defined on a finite set of elements of the integer lattice Zn of the n-dimensional Euclidean space IRn. It is assumed that the set is integrally convex, which implies that the convex hull of the set can be subdivided in...

AMS classifications: 90C33, 90C26, 91B50.

Three metrics are designed to assess Colombian financial institutions’ size,<br/>connectedness and non-­substitutability as the main drivers of systemic<br/>importance: (i) centrality as net borrower in the money market network;<br/>(ii) centrality as payments originator in the large-value payment...

This paper develops a theory of central bank accountability. Two aspects of accountability are considered. The first one is transparency of actual monetary policy, the second aspect is the question of who bears final responsibility for monetary policy. Monetary policy is transparent if there is...

Opting for structural or reduced form estimation is often hard to justify if one wants to both learn about the structure of the economy and obtain accurate predictions. In this paper, we show that using both structural and reduced form estimates simultaneously can lead to more accurate policy...

The U.S. economy appears to have experienced a pronounced shift toward higher productivity over the last five years or so. We wish to understand the implications of such shifts for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules in simple dynamic economies. Accordingly, we begin with a standard...