By any measure, the European Monetary Union and the European Union are in a deep hole. In the summer of 2011 we came uncomfortably close to an uncontrolled sovereign default of an EU country, a member of the European Monetary Union, hardly ten years after the common currency project was...

In this paper we adapt a dynamic discrete choice model to examine the aggregated demand for single- and multi-year crop insurance contracts. We show that in a competitive insurance market with heterogeneous risk averse farmers, there is simultaneous demand for both insurance contracts. Moreover,...

This paper tests whether the Ricardian Equivalence proposition holds in a life cycle consumption laboratory experiment. This proposition is a fundamental assumption underlying numerous studies on intertemporal choice and has important implications for tax policy. Using nonparametric and panel...

The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication - i.e. who is talking with whom - on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...

Modelling the dynamics of credit derivatives is a challenging task in finance and economics. The recent crisis has shown that the standard market models fail to measure and forecast financial risks and their characteristics. This work studies risk of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) by...

This work develops change-point methods for statistics of high-frequency data. The main interest is the volatility of an Itˆo semi-martingale, which is discretely observed over a fixed time horizon. We construct a minimax-optimal test to discriminate different smoothness classes of the...

There is consensus that the recent nancial crisis revolved around a crash of the short-term credit market. Yet there is no agreement around the necessary policies to prevent another credit freeze. In this experiment we test the eects that contract length (i.e. maturity mismatch) has on the...

Retailers may enjoy stable cartel rents in their output market through the formation of a buyer group in their input market. A buyer group allows retailers to credibly commit to increased input prices, which serve to reduce combined final output to the monopoly level; increased input costs are...

We quantify spillovers of inflation expectations between the United States (US) and Euro Area (EA) based on break-even inflation (BEI) rates. In contrast to previous studies, we model US and EA BEI rates jointly in a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model. The SVAR approach allows to...

We introduce a dynamic banking–macro model, which abstains from conventional mean– reversion assumptions and in which—similar to Brunnermeier and Sannikov (2010)—adverse asset–price movements and their impact on risk premia and credit spreads can induce instabilities in the banking...