We investigate a model of stratified economic interactions between agents when the notion of spatial location is introduced. The agents are placed on a network with near-neighbor connections. Interactions between neighbors can occur only if the difference in their wealth is less than a threshold...

Passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, in conjunction with a Supreme Court ruling supporting a Freedom of Information Act request, required the Federal Reserve (Fed) to disclose bank-specific information about its emergency lending during the financial crisis. The disclosures revealed...

The Financial Crisis that started in 2007 ushered in new responsibilities for central banks, particularly for what is termed “macro-prudential policy,” or MPP. The goal of this policy is to monitor and contain overall risk in the financial sector. Implementing MPP, however, carries the...

How have the politics of banking crises changed over the long run? Unlike existing static accounts, we offer a dynamic theory emphasizing how the emergence of voters’ “great expectations” after the 1930s concerning crisis prevention and mitigation reshaped the politics of banking crises in...

How does the change in the creditworthiness of a financial institution or sovereign impact its creditors’ solvency? I address this question in the context of the recent European sovereign debt crisis. Considering the network of Eurozone member states, interlinked through investment...

This paper highlights connections between the discrete and continuous approaches to optimal auction design with single and multi-dimensional types. We provide an interpretaion of an optimal auction design problem in terms of a linear program that is an instance of a parametric shortest path...

We consider any network environment in which the best shot game is played. This is the case where the possible actions are only two for every node (0 and 1), and the best response for a node is 1 if and only if all her neighbors play 0. A natural application of the model is one in which the...

Business cycles tend to comove across countries. However, standard models that attribute comovement to propagation of exogenous shocks struggle to generate a level of co-movement that is as high as in the data. In this paper, we consider models that produce business cycles endogenously, through...

The discounting of future felicity flows transposes to the intertemporal optimization context the assumption of interest-bearing wealth or savings. The validity of the hypothesis has been challenged by several empirical (ir)regularities and by the theoretical implications for human decision...