The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The consumption of electricity turns out to be a valuable proxy, if it is corrected for...

The great financial turmoil that started 2007 has brought bank regulation back into the political debate. There is talk about imposing new regulations on banks and other financial intermediaries. Yet, we are not convinced that it is completely understood how the existing regulation affects...

We present evidence on the changing dynamics of the yield curve from 1998 to 2011. We identify four different phases. As expected, the financial crisis represents a period of elevated yield volatility, but it can be split into two distinct periods. The split occurs when the Federal Reserve...

We review different kinds of corruption that have been observed in procurement auctions and categorize them. We discuss means to avoid corruption, by choice of preferable auction formats, or with the help of technological tools, such as secure electronic bidding systems. Auctions that involve...

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This invites corruption. We propose a model of corruption in which the auctioneer orchestrates bid rigging by inviting a bidder to either lower or raise his bid, whichever is more profitable. We characterize equilibrium bidding in...

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss Banks is a very significant part of the recent history of the Swiss financial industry. It has accelerated the transformation of the Swiss banking industry from a system that relied on bank secrecy to a much more compliant one. It was also rather costly for the...

We establish that a monopoly bank never uses collateral as a screening device. A pooling equilibrium always exists in which all borrowers pay the same interest rate and put zero collateral. Absence of screening leads to socially inefficient lending in the sense that some socially productive...