The enlargement of the European Monetary Union is likely to lead to an increase in uncertainty regarding the transmission of monetary policy for the larger union. Adding new members to the central bank council will in addition imply that the policy reaction of the enlarged council will be...

In several European merger cases competition authorities have demanded that the merging firm auctions off virtual capacity. The buyer of virtual capacity receives an option on an amount of output at a pre-specified price, typically equal to marginal cost. This output is sold in the market in...

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This invites corruption. We propose a model of corruption in which the auctioneer orchestrates bid rigging by inviting a bidder to either lower or raise his bid, whichever is more profitable. We characterize equilibrium bidding in...

Empirical evidence from the U.S. and the European Union suggests that regions which contribute to interregional redistribution face weaker borrowing constraints than regions which benefit from interregional redistribution. This paper presents an argument in favor of such differentiated budgetary...

This paper analyzes the sustainability of intergenerational transfers in politico-economic equilibrium. Embedding electoral competition for the votes of old and young households in the standard Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers naturally arise in a Markov perfect...

This article studies the characteristics of a S-based tax system under default risk. In particular we show that its neutrality properties depend on whether debt is protected or unprotected. In the former case, this system is neutral. In the latter case, where default timing is optimally chosen...

In this paper we highlight aspects related to the links between international migration, foreign tied aid and the welfare state. We model migration as a costly movement from an aid-recipient developing country with low income, poor infrastructure, and no welfare system, towards a rich donor,...

This paper shows that a manufacturer may benefit from parallel trade. In addition to an intuitive condition about the effect of demand shocks, this occurs when competitive retailers must order inventories before they know the realization of demand and for products whose sale value drops at the...

Do Walrasian markets function orderly in the presence of adverse selection? In particular, is their outcome efficient? This paper addresses these questions in the context of a Rothschild and Stiglitz insurance economy. We identify an externality associated with the presence of adverse selection...

A univariate GARCH(p,q) process is quickly transformed to a univariate autoregressive moving-average process in squares of an underlying variable. For positive integer m, eigenvalue restrictions have been proposed as necessary and sufficient restrictions for existence of a unique mth moment of...