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Working Paper
The auctions of Swiss government bonds: should the Treasury price discriminate or not?
Ever since Friedman's (1960) contribution, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether the Treasury should auction off its government debt with a discriminatory or with a uniform price format. Many industrialized countries, the United States or Germany, for instance, use discriminatory auctions, while Switzerland applies to uniform price rule. Using recent contributions to multi-unit auction theory, we analyze data on the bids submitted to Swiss Treasury bond auctions over the last three years. We then construct hypothetical bid functions that would occur under price discrimination. ...
Working Paper
Certainty equivalence and the non-vertical long run Phillips-curve
This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound constraint on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the 1980s and 1990s, the consequences of the zero bound are negligible for target inflation rates as low as 2 percent. However, the effects of the constraint are very non-linear with respect to the inflation target and produce a quantitatively significant deterioration of the performance of the ...
Working Paper
Optimal discretion
This paper investigates the desirability of adopting a rule in favor of discretionary monetary policy in a model exhibiting Kydland and Prescott's dynamic inconsistency problem. We deviate from earlier work by adopting assumptions regarding policymaker preferences and inflation dynamics that are compatible with empirically motivated models used for macroeconomic policy evaluation. In particular, we dispense with the notion of a fundamental incompatibility between the policymaker's price stability and full employment objectives and allow for stickiness in the determination of inflation. In ...
Working Paper
The multiple unit auction with variable supply
The theory of multiple unit auctions traditionally assumes that the offered quantity is fixed. I argue that this assumption is not appropriate for many applications because the seller may be able and willing to adjust the supply to the bidding. In this paper I address this shortcoming by analyzing a multi-unit auction game between a monopolistic seller who can produce arbitrary quantities at constant unit cost, and oligopolistic bidders. I establish the existence of a subgame-perfect equilibrium for price discriminating and for uniform price auctions. I also show that bidders have an ...
Working Paper
A discrete model of discriminatory price auctions - an alternative to Menezes-Monteiro
Menezes and Monteiro, Math. Soc. Sci. (1995), show that a multi-unit discriminatory price auction does not have a pure strategy equilibrium unless one imposes some rather special conditions on the demand functions. This non-existence result might indicate a problem either with the underlying auction procedure (as Menezes and Monteiro suggest) or with the modelling approach (as we suggest). We observe that the non-existence problem disappears if bids must come in multiples of smallest units --- a realistic feature. Moreover, we show that most of the analysis can be recast in a discrete action ...