The paper studies the changing relations between political systems and banking systems. After a brief survey of traditional mechanisms of protection for banks from competition combined with subsidized finance for selected worthy purposes, the paper sketches the structural change that has taken...

This lecture discusses the 2010 crisis of the European Monetary Union and draws some lessons for reform. Crisis resolution has been difficult because the sovereign debt crisis of countries like Greece and Portugal has come together with real-estate and banking crises in countries like Ireland...

Die geplante materielle Privatisierung der Deutschen Bahn AG kann als logischer Schritt der formalen Bahnprivatisierung vom 1.1.1994 angesehen werden. Welche Privatisierungsmodelle werden gegenwärtig diskutiert? Sollte die Deutsche Bahn AG mit oder ohne ihr Betriebsnetz an die Börse gehen? Ist...

Over the past decade European economic integration has seen considerable institutional success, but the economic performance of the EU has been varied. While macroeconomic stability has improved and an emphasis on cohesion preserved, the EU economic system has not delivered satisfactory growth...

For an incomplete-information model of public-good provision with interim participation constraints, we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated, with approximately full surplus extraction, when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small. The result holds even if...

The paper studies insurance with moral hazard in a system of contingent-claims markets. Insurance buyers are modelled as Cournot monopolists or oligopolists. The other agents condition their expectations on market prices, as in models of rational-expectations equilibrium with asymmetric...

The paper discusses criteria for comparing risk aversion of decision makers when outcomes are multidimensional. A weak concept, ”commodity specific greater risk aversion”, is based on the comparison of risk premia paid in a specified commodity. A stronger concept, ”uniformly greater risk...

Rodrigues-Neto (2009) has shown that a given specification of posteriors of different players in an incomplete-information setting is compatible with a common prior if and only if the posteriors satisfy the so-called cycle equations. This note shows that, if, for any player, any element of the...