In the presence of macroeconomic shocks severe enough to threaten the liquidity or solvency of the banking system, the regulator can rely on the funds concentration effect to save long-term investment projects. Some banks are forced into bankruptcy with the result that other banks obtain more...

In this paper we introduce flexible majority decision rules where the size of the majority depends on the proposal made by the agenda setter. Flexible majority rules can mitigate the disadvantages of democracies in the provision of public projects. In many cases, the combination of the...

In this paper, we show that the shortcomings of the unanimity rule can be alleviated by complementing it with the following constitutional principles: broad packages with many public projects can only be proposed once in a legislative term, the agenda setter needs to pay the highest taxes he is...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide the analytics and robustness of the relationship between default correlations. We show that loans with higher default probabilities will not only have higher variances but also higher correlations between loans. As a consequence,...

In this Paper, we design democratic constitutions that can transcend the shortcomings of the unanimity rule. The constitution embeds the unanimity rule in a set of virtue-supporting principles: (a) broad packages with many public projects (bundling) are allowed, but can only be proposed once in...

Some regulatory programs are effective only if firms make some irreversible investments which reduce the cost of compliance. A firm potentially subject to regulation may therefore behave strategically - not investing and thus forcing the regulator to void the proposed regulation. We show that...

We study a credit market with adverse selection and moral hazard where sufficient sorting is impossible. The crucial novel feature is the competition between lenders in their choice of contracts offered. Qualities of investment projects are not observable by banks and investment decisions of...

We examine the constitutional design required for democratic societies to overcome poverty traps. Restricting agenda setting by ensuring subsistence levels of consumption and applying simple majority voting as a decision rule will not enable a society to overcome poverty. We show that a...