With the adoption of a common currency the degree of substitution between financial instruments supplied by EMU Member States to finance their national debts has risen. Providing the market for euro-denominated government securities with a large volume of similar financial instruments is likely...

This paper analyzes the existing relationship between ethnic fractionalization, corruption and the growth rate of a country. We provide a simple theoretical model. We show that a nonlinear relationship between fractionalization and corruption exists: corruption is high in homogeneous or very...

We study the ex-ante budget devoted by a Political Principal to a Competition Authority in charge of collecting evidence on the Industry's behavior. The Industry can capture both the Principal (lobbying) for a reduced budget, and the Authority (side-contracting) so as to avoid fines. Authority's...

We estimate, using a previously unexploited set of data for the Italian public debt, quarterly yield curves over the period 1970-1996 to test the main implications of the expectations hypothesis theory (EH). Our empirical results show that short-term interest rates move according to the...

Why do dynamic inconsistencies in monetary policy exist? In this paper a traditional model without put inefficiencies is introduced, but monetary policy is allowed to be influenced by the various constituencies in the economy, that pressure Congress in turn to pressure the central bank to adopt...

In 1975 Niels Thygesen, together with eight other economists - one of us among them - published in The Economist a "manifesto" proposing a new common currency for Europe (Basevi et al., 1975). His co-operation on this subject was pursued within a smaller group, and resulted in the publication of...