This paper proposes a reassessment of the old-age debate on universal banking and growth by putting it on a different plan. Modern financial economics are used to provide new theoretical foundations to Gerschenkron’s (1962) hypothesis: universality is interpreted as a strategy for banks to...

Since information asymmetries have been identified as an important source of bank profits, it may seem that the establishment of information sharing (e.g., introducing credit bureaus or public registers) will lead to lower investment in acquiring information. However, banks base their decisions...

Can the central bank of a small open economy be mandated with the maintenance of both fixed exchange rates and monetary independence, and still succeed in the long term? Looking at a pioneering experiment put in place by the National Bank of Belgium, this article shows how foreign exchange...

Using ten years of FX transactions data we demonstrate that a large share of the FX forward discount bias can be accounted for by order flow. A simple microstructure-based decomposition suggests that order flow creates a timevarying risk premium that is correlated with the forward discount. The...

This paper proposes a method and a toolkit for solving optimal policy with imperfect commitment in linear quadratic models. As opposed to the existing literature, our method can be employed in medium- and large-scale models typically used in monetary policy. We apply our method to the Smets and...

We study how non-listed firms trade off financial, real, and distributive uses of cash. We show that firms' marginal value of cash (MVC) affects the mix of external and internal finance used to absorb fluctuations in cash flows; in particular, high-MVC firms employ substantially more external...

For later generations, August 1914 has become a watershed in monetary history. In a matter of days, the belligerent and neutral countries of Europe alike suspended the gold standard. The international monetary regime that had served the world economy for close to four decades was no more....

Electronic trading has transformed foreign exchange markets over the past decade, and the pace of innovation only accelerates. This formerly opaque market is now fairly transparent and transaction costs are only a fraction of their former level. Entirely new agents have joined the fray,...

Does a "one model fits all" approach apply to the econometric modeling of regional house price determination? To answer this question, we utilize a panel of 100 US Metropolitan Statistical Areas over the period 1980q1-2010q2. For each area we estimate a separate cointegrated VAR model, focusing...

In an environment where economic structures break, variances change, distributions shift, conventional policies weaken and past events tend to reoccur, economic agents have to form expectations over different regimes. This makes the regime-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium...