Central bankers express concerns that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) might disintermediate commercial banks and facilitate bank runs. We analyze these concerns in a DSGE framework and provide a rationale for the disintermediation of the banking sector. Our focus is on the central bank's...

The growing popularity of fintechs has led the Financial Stability Board (FSB) to publish considerations about the effects of this emerging industry on stability and efficiency in the financial sector. Against this background, this paper compares the effects of competition and collaboration...

How can tax policy improve financial stability? Recent studies point to large potential stability gains from a reform that eliminates the debt bias in corporate taxation. Such a reform reduces bank leverage. This paper emphasizes a novel, complementary channel: bank risk taking. We model the...

The question of the determinants of inter-regional knowledge flows has received a growing interest in the recent past. Particularly, the question of the relationship between geography and networks has been debated. Yet, at the inter-regional level, there is no study assessing the effect of...

We analyse the determinants of network formation in German's biotechnology sector combining elements from social network analysis (SNA) and a regression framework for count data. For the latter we adopt a regional innovation system perspective, we estimate the number of total and interregional...

According to Duranton (2008), the main focus of spatial economics is the location choice of the economic agents. In order to explain the location and the agglomeration of agents in certain locations, one must relax the core assumptions of the neoclassic competitive framework. According to Fujita...

Credence goods markets, such as those for car repairs and medical treatments, are generally characterized by an ex-ante and ex-post information asymmetry between the uninformed buyer and the informed seller. Previous literature demonstrates that efficiency and fraud in a monopolist credence...

I show how irrational ideas and rumors can drive asset prices - not because anyone believes them, but because they are commonly known without being common knowledge. The phenomenon is driven by short-term market participants who are well-informed about the information that others have, and who...

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s...

The standard agency model assumes that the agent does not care how his decisions influence others. This is a strong assumption, which we relax. We find that, although monetary incentives are effective also with sociallyattentive agents, the principal may optimally set none. This could explain...