There is a wide variation in the structure of financial systems in different countries. We compare two idealized polar extremes. In one, which we refer to as the "German model," banks and other intermediaries predominate. In the other, which we refer to as the "U.S. model," financial markets...

How should new securities be designed? Traditional theories have little to say on this: the literature on capital structure and general equilibrium theories with incomplete markets take the securities firms issue as exogenous. This paper explicitly incorporates the transaction costs of issuing...

The returns of assets that are traded on financial markets are more volatile than the returns offered by intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies. This suggests that individual investors are exposed to more risk in countries which rely heavily on financial markets. In the absence of...

The returns of assets that are traded on financial markets are more volatile than the returns offered by intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies. This suggests that individual investors are exposed to more risk in countries which rely heavily on financial markets. In the absence of...

In a provocative paper, Galí (2014) showed that a policymaker who raises interest rates to rein in a potential bubble will only make a bubble bigger if one exists. This poses a challenge to advocates of lean-against-the-wind policies that call for raising interest rates to mitigate potential...

Galí (2014) showed that a monetary policy rule that raises interest rates in response to bubbles can paradoxically lead to larger bubbles. This comment shows that a central bank that wants to dampen bubbles can always do so by raising interest rates aggressively enough. This result is different...