During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in ‘emergency economic’ policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical...

This paper discusses the unique features of Austrian economics and some of the recent contributions of this school of thought. We organize these contributions in different research “buckets” in the hope that this will be a useful guide to readers while demonstrating the ongoing relevance of...

We document the mechanism through which the risk of fire sales in the sovereign bond market contributed to the effectiveness of two major central bank interventions designed to restore financial stability during the European sovereign debt crisis. As a lender of last resort via the long-term...

The authors offer perspective on the world financial crisis. Specifically, they claim it was a perfect storm of policy errors that caused the housing bubble and then perpetuated the recovery period into an over-extended recession

Banking has grown too much in Europe - in three senses. First, the European banking system has reached a size where its contribution to real economic growth is likely to be nil or negative. Second, the European financial structure is biased towards banks (rather than securities markets), which...

For markets to work efficiently, buyers and sellers must be able to transact easily. People must have access to a marketplace such as a supermarket or a stock exchange with adequate liquidity. Further, people must have confidence that such a well-functioning marketplace will also exist in the...

The paper analyzes the financial crisis of through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures. We present a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory focus on...