Consider the portfolio problem of choosing the mix between stocks and bonds under a downside risk constraint. Typically stock returns exhibit fatter tails than bonds corresponding to their greater downside risk. Downside risk criteria like the safety first criterion therefore often select corner...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

We study auctions in which the number of potential bidders is large, such as in Internet auctions. With numerous bidders, the expected revenue and the optimal bid function in a first price auction result in complicated expressions, except for a few simple distribution function for the bidders'...

Estimators of regression coefficients are known to be asymptotically normally distributed, provided certain regularity conditions are satisfied. In small samples and if the noise is not normally distributed, this can be a poor guide to the quality of the estimators. The paper addresses this...

There is a widely held view that existing differences in the capital and moneymarket structures across EMU countries are an important matter of concern forthe ECB, because they might hinder the uniform transmission of monetary policyactions. We argue that many aspects of financial structure are...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...

This paper reconsiders Tullock's analysis of rent seeking andwasteful overdissipation. The purpose of this paper is to point outthat even though his original analysis of overdissipation istechnically flawed, the definition of overdissipation can bemodified to explain instances in which rational...

Accurate prediction of the frequency of extreme events is of primary importance in many financialapplications such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) analysis. We propose a semi-parametric method for VaRevaluation. The largest risks are modelled parametrically, while smaller risks are captured by the...

This paper provides evidence that the choice of the foreign exchange regime is not of first order importance for achieving high output growth. It is argued that due to the forward looking nature of the foreign exchange market, exchange rate stability hinges on the current and anticipated...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825611001151">'Games and Economic Behavior'</A>, 74(1), 399-406. <P>The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this...</p></a>