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.

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...

The theory of multiple unit auctions traditionally assumes that the offered quantity is fixed. I argue that this assumption is not appropriate for many applications because the seller may be able and willing to adjust the supply to the bidding. In this paper I address this shortcoming by...

Ever since Friedman's (1960) contribution, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether the Treasury should auction off its government debt with a discriminatory or with a uniform price format. Many industrialized countries, the United States or Germany, for instance, use discriminatory...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound constraint on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S....

Menezes and Monteiro, Math. Soc. Sci. (1995), show that a multi-unit discriminatory price auction does not have a pure strategy equilibrium unless one imposes some rather special conditions on the demand functions. This non-existence result might indicate a problem either with the underlying...

The author presents a computer game that puts the player in the role of a central bank governor. The game is a stochastic simulation of a standard reduced form macro model, and the user interacts with this simulation by manipulating the interest rate. The problem the player faces is in many ways...

Bank regulation is supposed to reduce the probability of bank failure and, if a failure occurs, to contain the damage so that system-wide problems are unlikely. The current regulatory framework, known as Basel II, is based, among other things, on risk-adjusted capital requirements. This...