Licensing is a widely used technique applied to impose regulations. Firms inducing harm must hold a license issued by a regulatory agency on a case-by-case basis. A firm may also be subject to liability. This paper studies the implications on social welfare of combining licensing with strict...

Regulation of waters to generate electricity contributes to two different, but related flood risks. A dam may break resulting in a catastrophic accident. “High flow” floods are less costly and occur when there are large amounts of rain falls in combination with filled reservoirs. Here, the...

The economic and financial crisis starting in 2007 revealed significant weaknesses in the resiliency of banks and other market participants to financial and economic shocks. In the context of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, which total hundreds of trillions of dollars in notional amounts,...

Over the past ten to fifteen years, central banks have begun to communicate more openly. The article describes the Swedish central bank’s communication experiences in two central areas: the role of real stability in monetary policy, and the interest-rate assumption used as a basis for the...

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This paper proposes a new approach for estimating potential output and the NAIRU. The methodology models these key unobservable economic variables as latent stochastic trends within a trivariate system of observables comprising information on unemployment, GDP, and inflation. Identification is...

One characteristic feature of central banks today is that policy decisions are almost exclusively made by a committee rather than by a single policy maker. Another is that central banks endeavour to be transparent. Together, this has brought to the fore an important but so far unresolved issue:...

One characteristic feature of central banks today is that policy decisions are almost exclusively made by a committee rather than by a single policy maker. Another is that central banks are considerably more transparent than they used to be. Together, this has brought to the fore an important...