We take issue with claims that the funding mix of banks, which makes them fragile and crisisprone, is efficient because it reflects special liquidity benefits of bank debt. Even aside from neglecting the systemic damage to the economy that banks' distress and default cause, such claims are...

Die deutsche Diskussion über die Europäische Währungsunion steckt in einer Empörungsfalle. Rechtsnormen und Zahlen werden ungenau und missverständlich wiedergegeben, Kausalzusammenhänge werden nicht belegt. Der Begriff des "Target-Kredits" vermengt volkswirtschaftliche und...

The paper gives conditions for dynamic inefficiency of laissez-faire allocations in an overlapping-generations model with safe and risky assets. If the rate of population growth is certain, the conditions given depend only on how the rate of return on safe assets compares to the growth rate. If...

The paper contributes to a symposium of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy on "Capitalism: What has Gone Wrong, What Needs to Change, and How can it be Fixed?". The analysis starts from the observation that, in the United States, the United Kingdom and continental Europe, widespread discontent...

An anonymous social choice function for a large atomless population maps cross-section distributions of preferences into outcomes. Because any one individual is too insignificant to affect these distributions, every anonymous social choice function is individually strategy- proof. However, not...

The paper studies efficient public-good provision in a model with private values whose distribution depends on a macro shock; conditionally on this shock, values are independent and identically distributed. A generalization of the Bayesian mechanism of d'Aspremont and Gérard-Varet is shown to...

The paper gives conditions for effi ciency and ineffi ciency of equilibrium allocations in an overlapping-generations model with a constant rate of population growth and with multiple assets, but without labour. Optimal portfolio choice implies that, for any period and history up to that period,...

This expository note uses Hilbert's "infinite hotel", a hotel where one can always find place for another guest even if the hotel is already full, to illustrate the failure of the First Welfare Theorem in "large-square" economies that have infinitely many participants as well as infinitely many...

This contribution to the panel on the future to EMU discusses the tensions that arise from the fact that banks are, on the one hand, an essential element of the monetary transmission mechanism and, on the other hand, an integral part of local, regional or national polities. Banking union can...

The paper provides mathematical foundations for modeling strategic interdependence with a continuum of agents where uncertainty has an aggregate component and an agent-specific component and the latter satisfies a conditional law of large numbers. This decomposition of uncertainty is implied by...