The paper extends Diamond's (1984) analysis of financial contracting with information asymmetry ex post and endogenous "bankruptcy penalties" to allow for risk aversion of the borrower. The optimality of debt contracts, which Diamond obtained for the case of risk neutrality, is shown to be...

The paper studies the role of income taxes and admission fees in financing excludable and nonexcludable public goods in a large economy. A renegotiation proofness condition makes the multidimensional Bayesian mechanism design problem tractable. Resulting formulae for optimal income taxes and...

Shareholder-creditor conflicts can create leverage ratchet effects, resulting in inefficient capital structures. Once debt is in place, shareholders may inefficiently increase leverage but avoid reducing it no matter how beneficial leverage reduction might be to total firm value. We present...

Supplementing the discussion in our book The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, this paper examines the plausibility and relevance of claims in banking theory that fragility in bank funding is useful because it imposes discipline on bank managers. The...

The paper gives an overview over issues concerning the role of financial stability in monetary policy and the relation between banking supervision and central banking. Following a brief account of developments in the European Monetary Union since its creation, the systematic treatment contains...

The paper discusses the prospects for European Banking Union as they appear in the summer of 2014. The first part gives an overview over the problems that gave rise to the Banking Union initiative, the second part discusses the legislative measures that have been taken towards this objective....