Based on a panel data model this paper investigates whether the effects of fiscal policy on national saving in Europe have changed after the Maastricht Treaty came into force. Recently Giavazzi, Jappelli and Pagano (2000) found evidence that national saving responds nonlinearly to fiscal policy...

The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

Are the measures of the European Stability Mechanism sufficient for preventing further debt crises similar to those in Greece and Portugal? Definitively not, because private investors still enjoy rather high interest rates of dubious government bonds without being adequately involved in bearing...

The authors provides a rigorous analysis of Milton Friedman's parable of the 'helicopter' drop of money - a permanent/irreversible increase in the nominal stock of fiat base money which respects the intertemporal budget constraint of the consolidated Central Bank and Treasury - the State....

Governments through the ages have appropriated real resources through the monopoly of the 'coinage'. In modern fiat money economies, the monopoly of the issue of legal tender is generally assigned to an agency of the state, the Central Bank, which may have varying degrees of operational and...

Previous studies found that Islamic stock market index in Malaysia (KLSI), does not react, or react negatively to interest rate, although one of the main criteria of Islamic finance is to avoid business and activities that yield interest because of its prohibition in Islamic laws. On the other...

The paper generalizes Feldstein's criticism (Perceived Wealth in Bonds and Social Security, 1976) of Barro's analysis (Are Government Bonds Real Net Wealth?, 1974) for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents...

This paper discusses alternative adjustment patterns in Bolivia over the last three decades using a SAM-based model that explicitly separates formal from informal activities, includes separate accumulation balance adjustments for different economic agents, differentiates closures by periods of...

A fall in house prices due to a change in its fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a closed...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy (Ramsey policies) in a model with sticky prices and unionized labour markets. Collective wage bargaining and unions monopoly power tend to dampen wage fluctuations and to amplify employment fluctuations relatively to a DNK model with walrasian...