This study examines public opinion in 15 European countries, on the proposal to establish an independent European Central Bank (ECB). Using data from Euro- barometer surveys for 1998 to 2000, which included a speci c question on this issue, we show that in ation performance is not su cient to...

Over the past two decades, many countries have passed legislation giving more independence to their central banks. This institutional evolution has concerned several developed countries but also developing countries and, is consistent with the Barro and Gordon's theory of time-inconsistent...

Over the last decade, a growing number of emerging countries has adopted inflation targeting as monetary policy framework. In a recent paper, Freedman and Laxton (2009) ask the question “Why Inflation Targeting?”. This paper empirically investigates this question by analyzing a large set of...

False money appeared as the general common issue in monetary debates that occured in European countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. It first refered to sovereignty, in a time of state-building, as well as to a serious economic problem. Beyond sovereignty and economy, justice and, then, the...

Although today's main organisation principle of monetary spaces is the nation-state's one, everyone can see it is not totally the case because of the existence and the development of local and social currencies and other sorts of parallel currencies. European history gives very useful lessons on...

As other European countries of that time, Early modern France was characterized by its monetary plurality. The purpose of the text is to present this plurality and analyse the ways it was articulated. After a presentation of the intention of the paper, Section 2 presents the problem of monetary...

In the aftermath of the sovereign debt criss, open-market interventions prevailed within the central bank's policy answers known under the label unconventional monetary policy measures. During interwar period, France was an isolated case, among the leading countries, by everlastingly rejecting...

We are interested in the occurrence of expectation-driven fluctuations of a rational bubble and the (de-)stabilizing role of monetary policy. Our explanation of fluctuations is based on credit market imperfections. For this purpose, we consider an overlapping generations exchange economy where...

We explore the existence of endogenous fluctuations with a rational bubble and the stabilizing role of fiscal and monetary policies. Consumers' credit constraints, the role of collateral and a portfolio choice are the key ingredients of our analysis. We consider an overlapping generations model...

The fiscal theory of the price level says that the price level can be made determinate if the government uses fiscal policies such that government liabilities explode unless the price in the first period is at the "right" level. The policy implications are disturbing, as they call for rather...