Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30-year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute this to two structural issues: banks had incentives to protect their local monopolies, and the inherent instability...

1. Possession and ownership : use of goods versus economic activity -- 2. The blindness of the great schools of economics towards ownership -- 3. The economic core of the ownership system : interest, money and property assets -- 4. The market as the result of the ownership-based economy -- 5....

The Islamic finance model is sufficiently well specified at the “bank-to-client” level, but does not regulate the “central bank-to-bank” and “bank-to-bank” relationships. This paper proposes a concrete Shariah-compatible mechanism for setting up an Islamic interbank loan market and...

The global finance crisis prompted central banks in many countries to cut short-term policy rates to near zero levels. Yet, lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. We argue that comparing lending rates to policy rates is misleading: banks do not...

Unexpected changes in the federal funds rate are shown to have significant effects on risk premia in the money market. The spread between interbank lending rates and U.S. Treasury bills tends to narrow when the FOMC decides to cut interest rates by more than the expectation implied by federal...