This paper analyzes the relationship between a central banker and his partisan political principals. Incentive contracts for central bankers are not designed by social planners but by partisan political principals who obey to their own incentives.

This paper reexamines the classical issue of the possible trade-offs between banking competition and financial stability by highlighting different types of risk and the role of leverage. By means of a simple model we show that competition can affect portfolio risk, insolvency risk, liquidity...

A major lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank lending market is crucial for banks facing large uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This paper studies the efficiency of the interbank lending market in allocating funds. We consider two different types of liquidity...

While domestic interbank markets are often considered to work in an efficient way, cross-country bank lending appears to be subject to market imperfections leading to persistent interest rate differentials. In a model where banks need to cope with liquidity shocks by borrowing or by liquidating...

In this paper we show how the order of Linear Stochastic Dominance proposed by Gollier (1995) can be applied to situations with dependent risky assets.

In addition to showing the connection between parallel contingent and noncontingent risk comparison problems, we articulate a method for solving both kinds of problems using the "basis" approach. The basis approach has often been used implicitly, but we argue that there is value to making its...