Chapter 1 is joint work with Günter Franke, University of Konstanz, and Markus Herrmann, HSBC London, and addresses the question how collateralized debt obligation (CDO-) transactions are designed. An important issue is the information asymmetry about the quality of securitized debt between...

We consider long-run behavior of agents assessing risk in terms of dynamic convex risk measures or, equivalently, utility in terms of dynamic variational preferences in an uncertain setting. By virtue of a robust representation, we show that all uncertainty is revealed in the limit and agents...

In this paper we give an alternative characterization for time-consistent sets of measures in a discrete setting. For each measure \mathbb{P} in a time-consistent set \mathcal{P} we get a distinct set of predictable processes which in return decribe the \mathbb{P} uniquely. This implies we get a...

This dissertation consists of two essays in international macroeconomics. Thefirst essay shows that optimal fiscal and monetary policy is time consistent in astandard small open economy. Further, there exist many maturity structuresof public debt capable of rendering the optimal policy time...

This paper investigates the strategic behavior between countries that have purchasing power on the world market for a certain good. Tariffs and quotas are not equivalent protection instruments in this oligopsonistic market. Policy active importers would be better off by colluding and setting...

Longer horizon returns are modeled by two approaches, which have different impact on skewness and excess kurtosis. The Levy approach, which considers the random variable at longer horizon as the cumulants of i.i.d random variables from shorter horizons, tends to decrease skewness and excess...

In the first chapter, I analyze the US banking industry in order to explain two facts. First, larger banks have lower but less volatile returns on loans compared to smaller banks over the years. Second, larger borrowers have better financial records, i.e. verifiable "hard" information, and they...

In the first chapter, I examine an incomplete markets economy in a politico-economic general equilibrium setting in which the median voter chooses the inflation rate. I use an environment where individuals face an uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity shock, and money is the only asset....