This paper explores the causes and consequences of cross-country variation in mortgage market structure. It draws on insights from several fields: urban economics, asset pricing, behavioral finance, financial intermediation, and macroeconomics. It discusses lessons from the credit boom, the...

The past decade has seen significant changes in the structure of the corporate lending market, with non-bank institutional investors playing larger roles than they historically have played. These non-bank institutional lenders typically have higher required rates of return than banks, but invest...

The aim of this paper is to propose a model of money laundering and an economic analysis model of money laundering by usury. The first one is an evolution of a model already present in the literature and the difference is in the way to evaluate the advantage for a criminal to reinvest the...

This paper focuses on microcredit, a financial tool adopted in many countries to fight financial exclusion and poverty. By employing microcredit strategies, small loans are granted to low income households who would ‘naturally’ be excluded from the formal financial system. Thus, microcredit...

We study whether the mechanism design in the central bank liquidity auctions matters for the interbank money market interest rate levels and volatility. Furthermore, we compare different mechanisms to sell liquidity in terms of revenue, efficiency and auction stage interest rate levels and...

In the knowledge based economy intangible resources are the primary value drivers. This is particularly true of companies such as banks. However, intangible resources (also called Intellectual Capital) appear difficult to measure. Today, there are several methods that allow us to measure...