On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

Warum Shylock effizient sein kann Eine Theorie über Wucherverträge In diesem Beitrag demonstrieren wir die Besonderheit von Wucherverträgen in bezug auf Bankdarlehen. Wucher ist gewöhnlich ein ineffizientes Ergebnis versagender Kreditmärkte. In unserem dynamischen Mikromodell dagegen kann...

Several European countries base their anti-usury laws on the definition of interest ceilings. Underlying this approach is the identification of high interest rates with the usurious nature of the relative credit contract; hence usury is nothing more than a particularly onerous credit...

Is the usurer just an illegal banker? Economic literature generally gives a positive answer to this question, as it does not identify any specific feature to differentiate the market of usury from any other credit market. The usurer offers a debit contract with the same qualitative...

The article presents a novel dynamic setting to compare old – usury – and new – cryptocurrency – money laundering techniques and uses it for calibration to shed light on their relative role as an effective device for the criminal organizations to clean their illegal revenues. The...

In advanced economies, the recent collapse of interest rates to the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) has triggered a series of research questions on how to navigate the new zero-interest credit environment. Focusing on illegal markets, it is possible to explain why usury still remains widespread after the...

The objective of this paper is to point up the link between the effectiveness of the anti-laundering regulations and the characteristics of the relative compliance costs for banks, with particular attention to the bank - customer relationships. The work is organized as follows. The second...

This study provides a theoretical contribution in order to analyze the connection between the legal system and its administration, on the one hand, and the efficiency of the banking system, on the other. The paper explains why inefficient legal systems survive even if they induce a badly...

This paper is the first to analyse the three-way relationship among money laundering, anti-money-laundering efforts and corruption. On the one hand, if we assume that the goal of criminals involved in corruption is to minimize the probability of being detected, then corruption represents a...

This paper examines the economy's vulnerability to money laundering in a given region. Assuming that criminals are rational investors who take into account risks and returns of both legal and illegal investments, we define vulnerability as a function of well-identified drivers. Proxies of these...