Most existing estimates of the macroeconomic costs of AIDS, as measured by the reduction in the growth rate of gross domestic product, are modest. For Africa-the continent where the epidemic has hit the hardest-they range between 0.3 and 1.5 percent annually. The reason is that these estimates...

The article analyses the risk weights of the IRB approaches as suggested by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in January 2001. It is shown that the risk weight formulas can be considerably simplified to an elementary formula which has become a part of later suggestions of the Basel...

We consider a firm which pays a worker for his effort over several periods. The more the firm pays in one period, the wealthier the worker is in the following periods, and so the more he must be paid for a given effort. This wealth effect can induce an employer to pay little initially and more...

The internal ratings based approach (IRB) of the Basel Committee has three problems: few incentives for banks to adopt the IRB approach, a complicated technical framework and very conservative aggregation rules. We suggest the following remedies: First, we suggest a new design of transition...

In this paper we point out that the presence of the budget constraint substantially affects the relative performance of organizational decision rules. For instance, if there are only two types of projects to decide upon, the hierarchy always performs better than the polyarchy. The same result...

Consider a firm which pays a (credit-constrained) worker for his effort over two periods. The more the firm pays in one period, the wealthier is the worker in the following period, and so the more he must then be paid for a given effort. We describe the profit-maximising contract under these...