The paper considers the response of a small, open dependent economy to a variety of fiscal and financial shocks. It also examines the influence of alternative budget-balancing rules on the response of the economy to external shocks, such as a change in the world interest rate. The approach...

The Paper deals with the principles that should govern the design of budgetary and financial policy. The analytical divorce between stabilisation policy, which concerns deviations from full employment (or full information) equilibrium and allocative policy which concerns the full employment (or...

The paper develops a forward-looking comprehensive accounting framework for the public sector. By integrating the public sector budget constraint forward in time the government's present value budget constraint (PVBC) is obtained. In addition to the familiar financial assets and liabilities,...

This paper studies the effects of prohibiting individuals from holding foreign assets, and of allowing firms to trade in foreign assets only up to what is needed to finance export and import activities. Although firms can perform arbitrage between domestic and foreign financial markets, this...

This paper analyses the empirical interdependence of asset returns, real activity and inflation from a multicountry and international point of view. We find that nominal stock returns are significantly related to inflation only in the United States, that the US term structure of interest rates...

On the basis of quarterly data in 1977-87 and the use of the Engle-Granger method of co-integration, we find that real and financial factors, insolvency and illiquidity, are all important, separate influences on the defaults of French firms. We capture the effect of illiquidity by constructing...

We show that supply-side financial shocks have a large impact on firms’ investment. We do this by developing a new methodology to separate firm credit shocks from loan supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990...

We show that direct investments by consumers without the use of financial intermediaries can efficiently allocate financial capital to firms seeking funding for production of a novel consumption good. In our setting, consumers are also investors, and their privately known consumption preferences...

In the last two decades the European financial markets have become more market-oriented. We analyse the economic and political forces that have triggered these changes as well as their likely welfare implications. We also try to assess whether this trend will continue. Based on our analysis, we...

European policy makers, notably in the euro area, seem to take for granted that the electorate will punish them for bold reform in product and labour markets. This may explain why progress in the euro area has been comparatively limited. This paper posits and, using a dataset for 21 OECD...