The paper finds empirical evidence on the ripple effect of sunspots on the interwar German economy. It identifies a sequence of negative shocks to expectations for the 1927 to 1932 period. The artificial economy predicts the 1928-1932 depression and a long boom from 1933 onwards. Overall, a...

This paper traces the euro zone’s inadequate macroeconomic performance in recent years back to the predominance of a restrictive macroeconomic policy mix based on a ‘new monetarist’ approach to economic policy. An approach based on a (post-)Keynesian analysis is presented as a growth and...

This paper traces the euro zone’s inadequate macroeconomic performance in recent years back to the predominance of a restrictive macroeconomic policy mix based on a ‘new monetarist’ approach to economic policy. An approach based on a (post-)Keynesian analysis is presented as a growth and...

This paper provides some further tests for the proposition that a larger public sector leads to smaller output volatility. Both Gali and Fatas & Mihov have provided some evidence which appears to support this proposition. Their evidence is, however, based on a relatively small sample of...

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic policy shocks in a Real- Business-Cycle Model with money. In addition to technology shocks, I include government consumption, government investment, tax rate and monetary policy as sources of random disturbances. Money is introduced in a...

The years following the Second World War were those of the greatest economic growth that Europe had ever seen. If the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, neutral in the conflict and ruled by dictatorial regimes, enjoyed that growth and had participated in the convergence phenomenon, Ireland,...

We set up a unified growth model capturing the transition of a primitive and egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, into an advanced and despotic early civilization, and finally into a more egalitarian industrial society. Agents are either landowners or landless; both earn income from human...

The main goal of this essay is to analyze the emergence of a barter economy, and the rise of centralized merchants and a barter redistribution system out of a primitive barter system. The environment is a spatial general equilibrium model where exchange is costly. Since exchange becomes more...

The recovery from the 1890s depression in Australia was prolonged, and economic growth 1895-1913 was below that in the comparable settler economies of Argentina and Canada. Why? Australia’s hesitant initial recovery is typically attributed to the imbalances in the economy resulting from the...

The interwar period was marked by the end of the classical gold standard regime and new levels of macroeconomic disorder in the world economy. The interwar disorder often is linked to policies inconsistent with the constraint of the open-economy trilemmathe inability of policymakers...