On January 1st, 1999, the European Central Bank (ECB) has started operating a common monetary policy on behalf of the 11 founding members of the European Monetary Union (EMU). There is a legitimate concern about the practicalities and the effectiveness of the decision-making process inside the...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal liquidity provision in simple continuous-time general-equilibrium model under uncertainty. It argues that liquidity provision is subject to moral-hazard problems due to the unobservebility of households' characteristics and characterizes...

We develop a model in order to explore how a bank's equity stake in a competitor of a borrower affects the financing relationship with the borrower and product market outcomes. The bank's affiliation with the competitor can give rise to anti- or pro-competitive effects. Large equity stakes can...

Switzerland is one of the few countries with a relatively mature funded pension scheme. This paper offers a short description of the Swiss system, highlighting two specific areas for which previous experience is particularly valuable. Taking the Swiss example, firstly, it illustrates the...

In this paper, we consider the organisation of international antitrust as an issue of institution design which involves a trade-off between an inadequate internalisation of external effects across jurisdictions and the risk of capture in a centralised agency. We focus on the first element of the...

We develop and apply a criterion to distinguish two paradigms of international trade theory: constant-returns perfectly competitive models, and increasing-returns monopolistically competitive models. Our analysis makes use of the pervasive presence of home-biased expenditure. It predicts that...