The idea of road pricing as a function of congestion costs in the United Kingdom (U.K.) was put forward in a seminal report published by the U.K. Ministry of Transport in 1964. After 35 years, little has been done and the reasons behind this delay are mainly political, as the failure to...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. What should be the optimal monetary policy satisfying these criteria? To answer this question, the paper proposes a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy. First, I derive the...

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private non-profits is the importance of missions, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission....

The paper discusses some fundamental problems in monetary economics associated with the determination and role of the numéraire. The issues are introduced by formalising a proposal, attributed to Eisler, to remove the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates by unbundling the numéraire and...

One can consider the concept of market neutrality for hedge funds as having breadth and depth: breadth reflects the number of market risks to which a fund is neutral, while depth reflects the completeness of the neutrality of the fund to market risks. We focus on market neutrality depth, and...

This paper shows how separation of ownership and control may arise as a response to overload costs, despite agency costs, and how conglomerates arise as solution to information asymmetries in capital markets. In a context where entrepreneurs have the ability to run projects and improve their...

Corporate finance theories suggest that problems of asymmetric information and moral hazard in credit markets can be addressed by choosing short-term maturities. Theories of debt renegotiation suggest that the credibility of the implicit commitment to not make concessions to insolvent borrowers,...

A prevalent feature in rating markets is the possibility for the client to hide the outcome of the rating process, after learning that outcome. This paper identifies the optimal contracting arrangement and the circumstances under which simple ownership contracts over ratings implement this...

This paper proposes an approach to estimating the relation between risk (conditional variance) and expected returns in the aggregate stock market that allows us to escape some of the limitations of existing empirical analyses. First, we focus on a nonparametric volatility measure that is void of...

Within an asymmetric information set-up in which individuals di¤er in terms of their risk aversion and can choose whether or not to take preventative action, we illustrate in a uni…ed framework the equilibrium possibilities with stand-alone long-term care insurance and annuity contracts. With...