We evaluate the forecast performance of a range of theory-based and atheoretical models explaining exchange rates and interest rates in US, UK and Japan. The decision-making environment is fully described for an investor who optimally allocates portfolio shares to domestic and foreign assets....

The current debate on the new Basel Accord gives rise to a natural question about the appropriate form of capital regulation. We construct a simple framework to analyze this issue. In our model the risk carried by a bank as well as managerial risk preference are a bank’s private information....

A crucial aspect of debt restructuring is the redistribution of value among many diverse interests, differing in priority, collateral and bargaining power. Focusing on renegotiable debt contracts in a continuous-time framework, we characterise the U.S corporate bankruptcy renegotiation (Chapter...

This article analyses promotion tournaments where candidates engage in multiple tasks. We consider a promotion rule where the winner of the promotion tournament is randomly selected from the best performers at each task. The promotion tournament can achieve an efficient outcome for any...

A recent revision to the preliminary measurement of GDP(E) growth for 2003Q2 caused considerable press attention, provoked a public enquiry and prompted a number of reforms to UK statistical reporting procedures. In this paper, we compute the probability of “substantial revisions” that are...

This paper examines whether partisan politics and opportunistic government behavior generate political cycles in a small open economy, and, if so, whether such effects survive under increased economic integration. We discuss evidence drawn from Cyprus for the period 1978-2006. The empirical...

This paper considers a buyer-seller contracting model in which the seller possesses private information about all relevant aspects of the state of nature, including how much each action is worth to the buyer. We argue that, given asymmetric information, the buyer may not entirely dismiss an...

Any non-stationary series can be decomposed into permanent (or "trend") and transitory (or "cycle") components. Typically some atheoretic pre-filtering procedure is applied to extract the permanent component. This paper argues that analysis of the fundamental underlying stationary economic...

In the New-Neoclassical Synthesis literature it is customary to use additively separable preferences, very often not campatible with long-run productivity growth and trend infation. The present paper shows that using multiplicatively separable preferences it is possible to gain further insight...

This paper analyses the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy using the original Barro and Gordon (1983) model extended to include fiscal policy, dynamics and the level of institutional quality, measured as bureaucratic corruption. It is found that delegating monetary policy to an...