Our objective is to identify a way of checking empirically the extent to which expectations are de-coupled from inflation, how well they might be anchored in the long run, and at what level. This methodology allows us then to identify a measure for the degree of anchorness, and as anchored...

Intraday margin is a generally accepted risk management tool of central counterparties to cover increased risk exposure during the day. Central counterparties may call for intraday margin on a routine basis, but also in case of extreme price volatility or large changes in positions of clearing...

This paper assesses the determinants of market impact costs of institutional equity trades, using unique data from the world's second largest pension fund. We allow the impact of trade characteristics and market conditions on trading costs to depend on the level of trading costs itself and...

Population aging and pension reform will have profound effects on international capital markets. First, demographic change alters the time path of aggregate savings within each country. Second, this process may be amplified when a pension reform shifts old-age provision towards more pre-funding....

This paper employs concepts from information theory to choosing the dimension of a data set. We calculate relative measures of information in the data in terms of eigenvalues and derive criteria to determine the `optimal' size of the data set, in particular whether an extra variable adds...

Antitrust authorities often argue that merchants cannot reasonably turn down payment cards and therefore are forced to accept unacceptably high merchant discounts. The paper attempts to shed light on this must-take cards view from two angles. First, the paper gives some operational content to...

This paper demonstrates that the level of competition in the existing Panzar Rosse (P-R) literature is systematically overestimated and that the tests on both monopoly and perfect competition are distorted. This is due to the use of bank revenues divided by total assets as dependent variable in...

A generalisation of Gompertz' distribution is proposed, and it is shown that continuous heterogeneous mortality models with Gamma distributed frailty have lifetime random variables distributed as the difference of two such generalised Gompertz random variables. With this result, limitations of...

Although some authors have suggested that monetary expansion is still possible when the monetary policy interest rate cannot be reduced further, central banks tend to avoid interest rates close to the zero lower bound. Taking into account central banks.aversion to very low interest rates, we...

Payments systems are typically characterized by some degree of tiering, with upstream firms (clearing agents) providing settlement accounts to downstream institutions that wish to clear and settle payments indirectly in these systems (indirect clearers). Clearing agents provide their indirect...