In this paper we show that deposit insurance can increase the probability of systemic banking crisis, even though it is optimally designed and its premium is risk related. This is driven by the possibility of contagious bank runs. We prove that contagion only occurs if the correlation between...

The Benefit and Cost of Winner Picking: Redistribution Vs Incentives

We consider the situation where the owner of some good wants to sell the good to one of several potential buyers. We assume that the owner possesses private information about the buyers' valuations of the good, and analyze this model as an informed principal mechanism design model. In an...

In this paper, the effects of so-called model misspecification and the effects of dropping the assumption that continuous rebalancing is possible are examined. Strategies which are robust if applied continuously fail to be robust if applied in discrete time. Therefore, the hedging bias which...

The paper reports laboratory experiments on a day-to-day route choice game with two routes. Subjects had to choose between a main road M and a side road S. The capacity was greater for the main road. 18 subjects participated in each session. In equilibrium the number of subjects is 12 on M and 6...

Not only corporate but also sovereign debtors, in particular developing countries, may get into financial difficulties. Contrary to corporate issuers, they decide themselves if they continue to fulfill their debt obligations or convert their debt. I analyze the value of a default-risky sovereign...

By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent's motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will then...

We characterize the preference domains on which the Borda count satisfies Arrow's ``independence of irrelevant alternatives" condition. Under a weak richness condition, these domains are obtained by fixing one preference ordering and including all its cyclic permutations (``Condorcet cycles")....