Central banks normally accept debt of their own governments as collateral in liquidity operations without reservations. This gives rise to a valuable liquidity premium that reduces the cost of government finance. The ECB is an interesting exception in this respect. It relies on external...

We establish that a monopoly bank never uses collateral as a screening device. A pooling equilibrium always exists in which all borrowers pay the same interest rate and put zero collateral. Absence of screening leads to socially inefficient lending in the sense that some socially productive...

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss banks is a very significant part of the recent history of the Swiss financial industry. It has accelerated the transformation of the Swiss banking industry from a system that relied on bank secrecy to a much more compliant one. It was also rather costly for the...

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss Banks is a very significant part of the recent history of the Swiss financial industry. It has accelerated the transformation of the Swiss banking industry from a system that relied on bank secrecy to a much more compliant one. It was also rather costly for the...

The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The consumption of electricity is a candidate for such a proxy.

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This delegation invites corruption. In this paper we propose a model of corruption, examine how corruption affects the auction game, how the anticipation of corruption affects bidding, and how it altogether changes the revenue ranking...