D - Microeconomics

• Uncertain Costs and Vertical Differentiation in an Insurance Duopoly

  Staff Working Paper 2014-14 Radoslav Raykov

  Classical oligopoly models predict that firms differentiate vertically as a way of softening price competition, but some metrics suggest very little quality differentiation in the U.S. auto insurance market.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): D, D4, D43, D8, D81, G, G2, G22, L, L2, L22

• Do Sunspots Matter? Evidence from an Experimental Study of Bank Runs

  Staff Working Paper 2014-12 Jasmina Arifovic, Janet Hua Jiang

  A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to sunspots in the context of a bank-run game in a controlled laboratory environment.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial markets, Financial stability JEL Code(s): C, C9, C91, C92, D, D8, D80, E, E5, E58, G, G2, G20

• Macroeconomic Experiences and Risk Taking of Euro Area Households

  Staff Working Paper 2014-10 Miguel Ampudia, Michael Ehrmann

  This paper studies to what extent the experiences of households shape their willingness to take financial risks. It follows the methodology of Malmendier and Nagel (2011) and applies it to a novel data set on household finances covering euro area households.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Sectoral balance sheet JEL Code(s): D, D0, D03, D1, D14, D8, D83, G, G1, G11

• Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area

  Staff Working Paper 2014-1 Michael Ehrmann, Michael Ziegelmeyer

  Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross‐country study has analyzed what determines household demand for mortgage types, a task that this paper takes up using new data for the euro area.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, E, E4, E43, E5, E52, G, G2, G21

• Expectations and Monetary Policy: Experimental Evidence

  Staff Working Paper 2013-44 Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Luba Petersen

  The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business-cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and the output gap by at least two-thirds.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Monetary policy implementation, Monetary policy transmission JEL Code(s): C, C9, D, D8, D84, E, E3, E5, E52

• Some Economics of Private Digital Currency

  Staff Working Paper 2013-38 Joshua S. Gans, Hanna Halaburda

  This paper reviews some recent developments in digital currency, focusing on platform-sponsored currencies such as Facebook Credits.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Bank notes, Digital currencies and fintech, Economic models, Payment clearing and settlement systems JEL Code(s): D, D4, D42, E, E4, L, L5, L51

• The Safety of Government Debt

  Staff Working Paper 2013-34 Kartik Anand, Prasanna Gai

  We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial stability, International financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D8, D81, E, E4, E44, F, F0, F02, F4, F41, G, G1, G15

• The ‘Celtic Crisis’: Guarantees, Transparency and Systemic Liquidity Risk

  Staff Working Paper 2013-31 Philipp König, Kartik Anand, Frank Heinemann

  Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and prevent bank runs. However, as the experiences of some European countries, most notably Ireland, have demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees are crucially intertwined with the sovereign’s funding risks.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): D, D8, D89, G, G0, G01, G2, G28

• The Threat of Counterfeiting in Competitive Search Equilibrium

  Staff Working Paper 2013-22 Enchuan Shao

  Recent studies in monetary theory show that if buyers can use lotteries to signal the quality of bank notes, counterfeiting does not occur in a pooling equilibrium. In this paper, I investigate the robustness of this non-existence result by considering an alternative trading mechanism.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Bank notes JEL Code(s): D, D8, D82, D83, E, E4, E42

• Are Sunspots Learnable? An Experimental Investigation in a Simple General-Equilibrium Model

  Staff Working Paper 2013-14 Jasmina Arifovic, George Evans, Olena Kostyshyna

  We conduct experiments with human subjects in a model with a positive production externality in which productivity is a non-decreasing function of the average level of employment of other firms.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models JEL Code(s): D, D8, D83, G, G2, G20