infonet-economy

The term “shadow banking” refers to credit intermediation performed outside the regulated perimeter of traditional lenders. Banks, however, do play a significant role in it. The authors review the origins and characteristics of the shadow banking system, investigate how banks control various steps of the securitization process, and analyze the nexus with competition. They use a…

A new method for determining the lag order of the autoregressive polynomial in regression models with autocorrelated normal disturbances is proposed. It is based on a sequential testing procedure using conditional saddlepoint approximations and permits the desire for parsimony to be explicitly incorporated, unlike penalty-based model selection methods. Extensive simulation results…

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all-pay auction. This allows, in particular, to provide simple conditions…

The recent credit crisis of 2007/08 has raised a debate about the so-called knife-edge properties of financial markets. The paper contributes to the debate shedding light on the controversial relation between risk-diversification and financial stability. We model a financial network where assets held by borrowers to meet their obligations, include claims against other borrowers and…

We study competitive equilibrium in a signaling economy with heterogeneously informed buyers. In terms of the classic Spence (1973) model of job market signaling, firms have access to direct but imperfect information about worker types, in addition to observing their education. Firms can be ranked according to the quality of their information, i.e. their expertise. In equilibrium,…

Many universities around the world rely on student instructors—current bachelor’s and master’s degree students—for tutorial teaching, yet we know nothing about their effectiveness. In a setting with random assignment of instructors to students, we show that student instructors are almost as effective as senior instructors at improving their students’ short- and longer-run academic…

Health nudge interventions to steer people into healthier lifestyles are increasingly applied by governments worldwide, and it is natural to look to such approaches to improve health by altering what people choose to eat. However, to produce policy recommendations that are likely to be effective, we need to be able to make valid predictions about the consequences of proposed…

Mitigation and adaptation represent two solutions to the issue of global warming. While mitigation aims at reducing CO2 emissions and preventing climate change, adaptation encompasses a broad scope of techniques used to reduce the impacts of climate change once they have occurred. Both have direct costs on a country’s Gross Domestic Product, but costs also arise from temperature…