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...

This paper studies the relation between Bayesian mechanism de- sign and the Ramsey-Boiteux approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods. For a large economy with private informa- tion about individual preferences, the two approaches are shown to be equivalent if and only if,...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theo- rem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the the- orem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

The paper studies outside finance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as effort choices. If the entrepreneur has insu¢ cient funds, a first-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than first-best outcomes. For...