Rony Hamaui

Italy is the first country to have experimented with both accruals and retrospective capital gains taxation along the lines suggested by Vickrey (1939) and Meade (1978). This paper describes the Italian experience, highlighting its peculiar features and the lessons that can be learned by other countries wishing to pursue these approaches. It illust...

This paper addresses the choice of banks between alternative channels for interbank payments. The conventional view assumes a tradeoff between the safety of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and the liquidity savings of multilateral netting. Moreover, correspondent banking is believed to be inefficient, both in terms of liquidity and of administrat...

Italy is the first country to have experimented with both accruals and retrospective capital gains along the lines suggested by Vickrey (1939) and Meade (1978). This paper describes the Italian experience highlighting its peculiar features and the lessons that can be learned by other countries wishing to pursue these approaches. It illustrates the...

For a long time the debate among economic analysts has been centred on the issue of informational efficiency in the process of determining financial assets’ prices. This concept has recently been developed to a great extent in studies regarding market micro-structure, in connection with the birth of new organised markets and the substantial mass of...

This paper analyzes the determinants of aggregate households' portfolio choices conditional on those components of wealth which can be regarded as highly or totally illiquid because of the existence of substantial transaction costs and/or institutional constraints on agents behaviour. The empirical analysis broadly confirms the importance of the ab...

Exchange Rate and Interest Rate Polarization. - The relationship between the polarization phenomenon in foreign exhange markets and a similar regu-larity in interest rate differentials is considered. In the case of perfect substitutability and of perfect foresight, both polarizations would be perfectly complementary. Risk premia and forecast errors...

Following years of control and regulation, there has been a massive trend towards the liberalisation of financial markets. This volume provides an analysis of this process and considers likely future developments. It is divided into three parts: the first covers the behaviour of households and firms; the second includes papers on stock, bond and cu...

A large number of studies have revealed how public debt instruments that are not compatible with pre-announced policies receive a cool reception from the investment community and cause a reduction in the credibility of these policies. In this paper we demonstrate how the issuance of callable bonds may offer attractive incentives for pursuing stabil...

In this article we try to assess the relative importance of real and financial determinants in firm's foreign currency borrowing by extending a model earlier developed by Kawai. We use this framework to examine the behavior of Italian firms during the 1980s. The financial components of firm's decisions are studied by means of a repeated mean-varian...