There is a widely held view that existing differences in the capital and moneymarket structures across EMU countries are an important matter of concern forthe ECB, because they might hinder the uniform transmission of monetary policyactions. We argue that many aspects of financial structure are...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...

This paper reconsiders Tullock's analysis of rent seeking andwasteful overdissipation. The purpose of this paper is to point outthat even though his original analysis of overdissipation istechnically flawed, the definition of overdissipation can bemodified to explain instances in which rational...

This paper provides evidence that the choice of the foreign exchange regime is not of first order importance for achieving high output growth. It is argued that due to the forward looking nature of the foreign exchange market, exchange rate stability hinges on the current and anticipated...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825611001151">'Games and Economic Behavior'</A>, 74(1), 399-406. <P>The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this...</p></a>

Banks provide risky loans to firms which have superior information regarding the quality of their projects. Due to asymmetric information the banks face the risk of adverse selection. Credit Value-at-Risk (CVaR) regulation counters the problem of low quality, i.e. high risk, loans and therefore...

The aim of the paper is to obtain confidence intervals for the tail index and high quantiles taking into account the optimal rate of convergence of the estimator. The common approach to obtaining confidence intervals presented in the literature is to use the normal distribution approximation at...

This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine "spillover" effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision...

A flurry of recent articles has argued on the basis of constructed European widemonetary aggregates that the demand for EURO's will be more stable than thecurrent demand for national currencies. In policy circles this seeminglymoderating effect of monetary integration figures as an additional...

The paper characterizes first and second order tail behavior ofconvolutions of i.i.d. heavy tailed random variables with supporton the real line. The result is applied to the problem of riskdiversification in portfolio analysis and to the estimation of theparameter in a MA(1) model.