When a spot market monopolist participates in the futures market, he has an incentive to adjust spot prices to make his futures market position more pro…table. Rational futures market makers take this into account when they set prices. Spot market power thus creates a moral hazard problem...

One possible explanation for the unsatisfactory implementation of IMF conditionality has been attributed to the lack of credibility of the IMF threat of interrupting financial assistance in case of non compliance with the negotiated conditions. In this paper we suggest that such lack of...

We investigate the impact of owner-occupied housing on financial portfolio and mortgage choice under stochastic inflation and real interest rates. To this end we develop a dynamic framework in which investors can invest in stocks and bonds with different maturities. We use a continuous-time...

Theory suggests that reputations, developed in repeated face-to-face interactions, allow nonanonymous, floor-based trading venues to attenuate adverse selection in the trading process. We identify instances when stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) experience a non-trivial...

This paper studies optimal intergenerational transfer policy under stochastic labor income and capital returns. It has implications for Social Security, government tax and debt policy, and DB pension funds. A stylized two-period overlapping-generations model is developed where a central planner...

Not only in the classic Arrow-Debreu model, but also in many mainstream macro models, an implicit assumption is that all agents honour their obligations, and thus there is no possibility of default. That leads to well-known problems in providing an essential role for either money or for...

This paper studies the impact of Swiss National Bank interventions, and news about these interventions, on the intraday volatility of the Swiss franc - U.S. dollar exchange rate. It extends the existing literature by characterising the the impact of different aspects of central bank...

This paper introduces a new parameter estimator of dynamic models in which the state is a multidimensional, continuous-time, partially observed Markov process. The estimator minimizes appropriate distances between nonparametric joint (and/or conditional) densities of sample data and...

Evidence that asset returns are more highly correlated during volatile markets and during market downturns (see Longin and Solnik, 2001, and Ang and Chen, 2002) has lead some researchers to propose alternative models of dependence. In this paper we develop two simple goodness-of-fit tests for...

With a move away from up-front charges following the introduction of stakeholder pensions, consumers are no longer penalised for lapsing on many long-term savings policies. Nevertheless, persistency rates may still provide an (imperfect) indicator of sales quality and provide some information on...