This lecture discusses the 2010 crisis of the European Monetary Union and draws some lessons for reform. Crisis resolution has been difficult because the sovereign debt crisis of countries like Greece and Portugal has come together with real-estate and banking crises in countries like Ireland...

Rodrigues-Neto (2009) has shown that a given specification of posteriors of different players in an incomplete-information setting is compatible with a common prior if, and only if, the posteriors satisfy the so-called cycle equations. This note shows that, if, for any player, any element of the...

The paper provides a specification of belief systems for models of large economies with anonymity in which aggregate states depend only on cross-section distributions of types. For belief systems satisfying certain conditions of mutual absolute continuity, the paper gives a necessary and...

This paper studies the design of optimal utilitarian mechanisms for an excludable public good. Excludability provides a basis for making people pay for admissions; the payments can be used for redistribution and/or funding. Whereas previous work assumed that admissions are governed by the...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are affine and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents

The paper analyses the causes of the current crisis of the global financial system, with particular emphasis on the systemic elements that turned the crisis of subprime mortgage-backed securities in the United States, a small part of the overall system, into a worldwide crisis. The first half of...

The paper studies outside finance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as effort choices. If the entrepreneur has insufficient funds, a first-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than first-best outcomes. For...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theorem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the theorem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

The first part of the paper considers the effects of pre-empting a resolution procedure for a troubled financial institution by a precautionary recapitalization as specified in Article 32 (4) (d) of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD). Benefits are seen for the maintenance of...

For a countable product of complete separable metric spaces with a topology induced by a uniform metric, the set of Borel probability measures coincides with the set of completions of probability measures on the product σ-algebra. Whereas the product space with the uniform metric is...