communication. Later on electronic connections have been established to other financial institutions and to major business customers. The SWIFT network managing international payment transactions established in 1973, is an early example of this. A major barrier towards development of a full digital circuit, which includes all steps in production and distribution, has been the lack of an extensi...

How to design bank capital requirements when banks can misreport the value of their assets? We show that the answer depends critically on the existence of secondary markets for bank assets. Without secondary markets, capital requirements based on banks’reporting are more socially desirable than a fixed capital requirement if savings on costly bank capital are suffi ciently high. Yet with second...

The non-tradability of human capital is often cited for the failure of traditional asset pricing theory to explain agents’ portfolio holdings. In this paper we argue that the opposite might be true — traditional models might not be able to explain agent portfolio holdings because they do not explicitly account for the fact that human capital does trade (in the form of labor contracts). We deriv...

European integration in the pharmaceutical market is characterized by unequal progress. Achieved tradability and retained national price controls resulted in parallel trade for pharmaceuticals. The paper explains the processes and the outcomes of a long term negotiation process among member states, EU Commission and the pharmaceutical industry. The paper derives the constellation of preferences...