Argentina’s money and banking system was hit hard by the Great Depression. The banking sector was awash with bad assets that built up in the 1920s. Gold convertibility was suspended in December 1929, even before the crisis seriously damaged the core economies. Commonly, these events are seen...

An efficient housing market is of critical importance for individual welfare and for a well-functioning economy. We test the efficiency of this market by estimating the factors that determine both the long-run and the dynamic paths of regional house prices. Our tests use a new quarterly regional...

This paper challenges the view that external shocks caused Euroland's 2001 slowdown and subsequent stagnation. Instead, the design of Euroland's macro policymaking arrangements is found lacking in looking after sufficient domestic demand growth. In the event the ECB has failed on its...

This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany’s ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the...

I investigate the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the U.S. wealth distribution in a model in which heterogeneous agents face idiosyncratic labor income risk and hold only one asset. The model's stochastic process for earnings is consistent with estimates from panel data. I calibrate the...

The financial turmoil that hit Russia in August 1998, was extremely confusing to many foreign observers working in Russia. It was astonishing to see a country that seemed on its way to prosperity suddenly experiencing an economic meltdown. As part of my work, I was often asked to provide...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables convey marginal information on the state of the Italian economy, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy in the 1990s. We follow two alternative approaches. First we map monetary...

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...

“Financial Liberalization” winds had blown for 1980s’ Turkey, affected from developed nations, resulted from the efforts of keeping in step with world trend, and hence the law that had been put into practice in 1989, “decree no.32”, had not only affected its era, also had left...

This paper analyzes disparities among nominal and real exchange rate movements across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries from 1991 to 1996. The method of analyzing such processes is to examine whether the differentials of exchange rate changes converge or diverge over time....