Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instrumentsof the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent tensions infinancial markets since summer 2007. In this paper, we analyse banks’ biddingbehaviour in the ECB’s main refinancing operations (MROs) during...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiringa company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition ofboth, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higherprices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

Are commonly known beliefs essential for bidding behavior in asymmetric auctions? Our experimental results suggest that not informing participants how values are randomly generated does not change behavior much and may even make it appear more rational.

We study the impact of Central Bank intervention on the process of price formation in currency markets. We use a unique dataset of tick-by-tick indicative quotes posted by dealers on Reuters terminals and of intraday sterilized spot interventions and customer transactions executed on behalf of...

What are liquidity crises? And what can be done to address them? This short paper brings together some personal reflections on this issue, largely based on previous work. In the process, it questions a number of commonly held beliefs that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The paper is...

Central banks, which used to be so secretive, are communicating more and more these days about their monetary policy. This development has proceeded hand in glove with a burgeoning new scholarly literature on the subject. The empirical evidence, reviewed selectively here, suggests that...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

The remarkable stability of low domestic inflation in many countries requires explanation. In this paper, a number of competing hypotheses are evaluated on a stand-alone basis, and all are found to be inadequate. This includes the view that this outcome has been solely the result of more...