This paper compares securities settlement gross and netting architectures. It studies settlement risk arising from exogenous operational delays and compares settlement failures between the two architectures as functions of the length of the settlement interval under different market conditions....

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changesoccur at regular intervals during the...

We use a novel disaggregate sectoral euro area data set with a regional breakdown to investigate price changes and suggest a new method to extract factors from over-lapping data blocks. This allows us to separately estimate aggregate, sectoral, country-specific and regional components of price...

We show how in a Blanchard-Yaari, overlapping generations framework, perfect substitutability of government bonds in Monetary Union tempts governments to exploit the enlarged common pool of savings. In Nash equilibrium all governments increase their bond financed transfers to current generations...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of risk-taking decisions in an economy that is prone to systemic risk, captured by financial amplification effects that occur in response to strong adverse shocks. It shows that decentralized agents who have unconstrained access to a complete set of Arrow...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...

This paper attempts to characterise an anti-inflationary monetary targeting (MT) regime. In order to derive a formal representation of this regime, we formulate the central bank’s optimisation problem under the assumption that it is possible for the monetary targeted variable to have an impact...

Growth of wages, unemployment, employment and vacancies exhibit strong asymmetries between expansionary and contractionary phases. In this paper we analyze to what degree downward wage rigidities in the bargaining process affect other variables of the economy. We introduce asymmetric wage...