When money was made of gold and silver, individuals faced the problem of determining the intrinsic content of coins in many exchange situations. In this paper we look at a well-documented solution to this problem, and a key institution of the commodity money system: coin assaying. To that goal...

Episodes of large capital inflows in small open economies are often associated with a shift of resources from the tradable to the non-tradable sector and sometimes lead to balance-of-payments crises. This paper builds a two-sector dynamic model to study the evolution of the sectoral structure...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...

This paper estimates the effect of income taxation and transfers on labour supply at the extensive margin, i.e., the labour force participation. We extend existing structural form methodologies by considering the effect of both taxes and transfers. Non-labour income contains the (hypothetical)...

We study the business cycles properties of the four largest European economies in the wake of the recent recession episodes. The analysis is based on the factors estimated from a multi-country and multi-sector data rich environment. We measure alikeness of business cycles by studying the...

This paper presents a theoretical model of how banks set their credit standards. It examines how a monopoly bank sets its monitoring intensity in order to manage credit risk when it makes long duration loans to borrowers who have private knowledge of their project's stochastic profitability. In...

In short-term forecasting, it is essential to take into account all available information on the current state of the economic activity. Yet, the fact that various time series are sampled at different frequencies prevents an efficient use of available data. In this respect, the Mixed-Data...

The marginal cost of aggregate fluctuations has a term structure that is a simple transformation of the term structures of equity and interest rates. I extract evidence from index option markets to infer a downward-sloping, volatile and procyclical term structure of welfare costs. On average,...

In this paper, we propose a model of the joint dynamics of euro-area sovereign yield curves. The arbitrage-free valuation framework involves five factors and two regimes, one of the latter being interpreted as a crisis regime. These common factors and regimes explain most of the fluctuations in...

We investigate the time varying relation between hours and technology shocks using a structural business cycle model. We propose an RBC model with a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function that allows for capital- and labor-augmenting technology shocks. We estimate the...