Following Lawrence Harris (1989b) study of price clustering in stock prices, we examine the smae phenomenon in the forex market. The pattern of clustering in the final digit of bid/ask prices depends on the desired degree of price resolution. The selection of spreads also involves clustering,...

The recent crisis underlined that proper estimation of distress-dependence amongst banks in a global system is essential for financial stability assessment. We present a set of banking stability measures embedding banks’ linear (correlation) and nonlinear distress-dependence, and their changes...

No abstract available.

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents.  The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them.  Agents thus have loss functions which are bounded above.  We work with a bell loss function which has this property.  With additive uncertainty the...

Using a new database covering some 91 supervisory agencies, this paper examines how important various skilled experts are in the regulatory process and the relative usage of different kinds of such experts. We seek to explore what kind of perspective supervisors in different institutional...

This paper develops a model of the lender of last resort (LOLR). In a simple one-period setting, the Central Bank (CB) should only rescue banks which are above a threshold size, thus providing an analytical basis for ¶too big to fail¶. In a dynamic setting, the CBs optimal LOLR policy is time...

In this paper we assess the performance of the New Keynesian IS Curve for the G7 countries. We find that there is an IS puzzle for both the purely backwardlooking as well as for the forward-looking IS curve. The real interest rate does not have a significantly negative effect on the output gap....

This paper is a copy of the author’s Per Jacobsson Lecture given at the University of Zurich on an occasion hosted by the Bank for International Settlements on Sunday June 27th, 2004. It is reproduced with the kind permission of the Per Jacobsson Foundation.

No abstract is available.

A Monetary Conditions Index (MCI), a weighted average of the short-term real interest rate and the real exchange rate, is a commonly used indicator of aggregate demand conditions. In-sample evidence for the US, the euro area, Japan and the UK suggests that a Financial Conditions Index (FCI),...