The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. It may still be too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy responses, but it is possible to analyze monetary and fiscal policies in the...

In this paper we reassess the cyclical performance of the French economy in the 1920s, focusing in particular on the period 1926-1931 and on France's resistance to the Great Depression. France expanded rapidly after 1926 and, unlike the other leading industrial economies, resisted the onset of...

Thia paper analyzes U.S. monetary-financial policy in the period leading up to the Treasury-Fed Accord. We model policy as an implicit target zone for the price level and an explicit zone for interest rates, and the difficulties on the eve of the Accord as an incipient run on a collapsing...

We analyse optimal discretionary games between a benevolent central bank and a myopic government in a New Keynesian model. First, when lump-sum taxes are available and public debt is absent, we show that a Nash game results in too much government spending and excessively high interest rates,...

We analyse the stability of countries within a monetary union in the face of asymmetric shocks, using a simple but widely applicable model. We show that members of the union may be subject to severe cycles following asymmetric shocks if there is a significant backward looking element in...