We examine whether it is socially beneficial for the individual voting records of central bank council members to be published when the general public is unsure about central bankers' efficiency and central bankers are aiming for re-election. We show that publication is initially harmful since...

In this paper we introduce flexible majority decision rules where the size of the majority depends on the proposal made by the agenda setter. Flexible majority rules can mitigate the disadvantages of democracies in the provision of public projects. In many cases, the combination of the...

We investigate a banking system subject to repeated macroeconomic shocks and show that without deposit rate control, the banking system collapses with certainty. Any initial level of reserves will delay the collapse but not avoid it. Even without a banking collapse, the economy still converges...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide the analytics and robustness of the relationship between default correlations. We show that loans with higher default probabilities will not only have higher variances but also higher correlations between loans. As a consequence,...

We develop a model to rationalize and examine so-called "research bubbles", i.e. research activities based on overoptimistic beliefs about the impact of this research on the economy. Research bubbles occur when researchers selfselect into research activities and the government aggregates the...

In the presence of macroeconomic shocks severe enough to threaten the liquidity or solvency of the banking system, the regulator can rely on the funds concentration effect to save long-term investment projects. Some banks are forced into bankruptcy with the result that other banks obtain more...