This paper argues that most of the facts charaterising small-scale businesses, including high failure rates, reliance on bank credit rather than equity finance, relatively low interest rate margins, and credit rationing, can be explained by a tendancy for those who are excessively optimistic to...

The paper adresses the issue of the distrbution by country of the costs and benefits associated to the introduction of a single currency in Europe, by estimating the relative costs and benefits of the 15 member state through the use of exploratory multivariate statistical techniques. Our results...

This paper shows that delegation of monetary policy to a central banker (CB) who is conservative in Rogoff's sense can still be desireable even though the government is able to set employment and/or inflation targets for the CB. A necessary and sufficient condition for Rogoff-conservatism is...

We show that it is sometimes efficient for a bank to commit to a policy that keeps information about its risky assets private. Our model, based upon Diamond-Dybvig [1983], has the feature that banks acquire information about their risky assets before depositors acquire it. Banks have the option...