We take issue with claims that the funding mix of banks, which makes them fragile and crisisprone, is efficient because it reflects special liquidity benefits of bank debt. Even aside from neglecting the systemic damage to the economy that banks' distress and default cause, such claims are...

The paper gives conditions for effi ciency and ineffi ciency of equilibrium allocations in an overlapping-generations model with a constant rate of population growth and with multiple assets, but without labour. Optimal portfolio choice implies that, for any period and history up to that period,...

This expository note uses Hilbert's "infinite hotel", a hotel where one can always find place for another guest even if the hotel is already full, to illustrate the failure of the First Welfare Theorem in "large-square" economies that have infinitely many participants as well as infinitely many...

For overlapping-generations models with multiple assets and without labour, welfare assessments of equilibrium allocations depend on whether the certainty equivalents of the one-period-ahead marginal rates of return on assets that are held are larger or smaller than the population growth rate....

The paper analyses the role of national central banks (NCBs) in the governance of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), NCBs are the owners of the European Central Bank (ECB), and their governors dominate the ECB's Governing Council, but in monetary policy operations, NCBs are...

Die deutsche Diskussion über die Europäische Währungsunion steckt in einer Empörungsfalle. Rechtsnormen und Zahlen werden ungenau und missverständlich wiedergegeben, Kausalzusammenhänge werden nicht belegt. Der Begriff des "Target-Kredits" vermengt volkswirtschaftliche und...

This contribution to the panel on the future to EMU discusses the tensions that arise from the fact that banks are, on the one hand, an essential element of the monetary transmission mechanism and, on the other hand, an integral part of local, regional or national polities. Banking union can...

The paper provides mathematical foundations for modeling strategic interdependence with a continuum of agents where uncertainty has an aggregate component and an agent-specific component and the latter satisfies a conditional law of large numbers. This decomposition of uncertainty is implied by...

The paper contributes to the discussion on whether real interest rates smaller than real growth rates can be taken as evidence of dynamic in- efficiency that calls for…scal interventions. A seemingly killing objection points to the presence of land, a non-produced durable asset whose value...

According to Homburg's (2014) comment on Kim and Lee (1997), an ad-valorem property tax on land cannot cause dynamic ineffi ciency of equilibrium allocations in an overlapping-generations model unless the tax is "confiscatory", i.e., equal to or greater than land rents. With such a tax, Homburg...