This paper starts by reviewing the recent literature on antitrust laws in banking from the perspective of general economic analysis. We focus on the US experience for didactic reasons and as a background against which the Swiss case is discussed further on. After an introductory section, we...

This paper compares exchange rate pass-through to aggregate prices in the US, Germany and Japan across a number of dimensions. Building on the empirical approaches in the recent literature, our contribution is to perform a thorough sensitivity analysis of pass-through estimates. We find that the...

The democratic accountability of policymaking institutions which are autonomous within delegated mandates has not received as much attention as their independence. We analyze in a theoretical model the effects of accountability inthe form of possible overriding of economic policy decisions by...

This paper is an empirical investigation into the question of whether increased independence affects central bank behavior, in particular when monetary policy is already in an inflation targeting regime. We take advantage of the unique experience in that sense of the United Kingdom, where the...

In a baseline stochastic new open-economy macroeconomics (NOEM) model which parallels alternative invoicing conventions, namely consumer's currency pricing (CCP) vs. producer's currency pricing (PCP), we revisit the question whether the exchange-rate regime matters for trade. We show...

This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences in different economic systems. We introduce inequality-averse and ine¢ ciency-averse agents responding to economic incentives and transmitting their ideology...