This paper analyses the implications of bank equity investment in firms on the stability of the banking system under conditions of asymmetric information and moral hazard. We show that there exists a « U-shaped » relationship between the risk of the universal and the investment banks?' asset...

The literature on bank provisioning behaviour shows that changes in loan loss provisions are counter-cyclical. Based on this stylised fact, this paper develops a partial equilibrium model of a banking firm that analyzes how provisioning rules influence credit market fluctuations. The model and...

Using a two-country model of monetary union where policymakers minimize the continuous-time equivalent of a Barro-Gordon-type loss function, we examine the value of the option of monetary disintegration when the national preference parameters associated with an inflationary surprise follow...