The purpose of this paper is to explore financial instability in this case due to a housing crisis and defaults on mortgages. The model incorporates heterogeneous banks and households. Mortgages are secured by collateral, which is equal to the amount of housing which agents purchase....

Until recently, financial services regulation remained largely segmented along national lines. The integration of financial markets, however, calls for a systematic and coherent approach to regulation. This paper studies the effect of market based regulation on the proper functioning of the...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the choice between adopting a monetary base or an interest rate setting instrument to maintain financial stability. Our results suggest that the interest rate instrument is preferable, since during times of a panic or financial crisis the Central Bank...

No Abstract Available.

This paper proposes a measure of financial fragility that is based on economic welfare in a general model calibrated against UK data. The model comprises a household sector, three active hetrogeneous banks, a central bank/regulator, incomplete markets and endogenous default. We address the...

In this papaer we, first, by explicitly taking account of the private sectors influence and pressure on the monetary authorities, provide a more plausible representation of the motivations of the two main players. We then incorporate persistence into the model and show that the optimal policy of...

This paper develops a simple model of an international lender of last resort (ILOLR). The World economy consists of many open economies, each with its own banking system and its own central bank which uses its reserves to manage a pegged exchange rate. The fragility of the banking system and the...

No Abstract Available.

We show, in an exchange economy with default, liquidity constraints and no aggregate uncertainty, that state prices in a complete markets general equilibrium are a function of the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank. Our model is derived along the lines of Dubey and Geanakoplos (1992)....

This paper studies the high frequency reaction of the DEM/USD exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from Germany and the U.S. The new content of each announcement is extracted using a set of market expectation figures supplied by MMS International. By using data...