Use of a promise to pay by a bank to insure an outstanding loan in order to return the value of the insured amount into capital for use in writing a new loan is an invention in banking with calculably greater potential economic impact than the original invention of reserve banking. The...

We provide a systematic analysis of fiscal consolidation in a medium-scale dynamic general equilibrium model. Our results show that the choice of the consolidation instrument is very important, not only with respect to the short- and long-run output effects of the different consolidation...

Recent research and events have brought fiscal policy back into the spotlight. Fiscal Taylor rules and error correction models have represented two different ways of quantifying the feedbacks from fiscal and economic conditions to fiscal policy decisions. This paper synthesizes these two ideas,...

This paper evaluates inflation forecasts made by Norges Bank which is recognized as a successful forecast targeting central bank. It is reasonable to expect that Norges Bank produces inflation forecasts that are on average better than other forecasts, both 'naïve' forecasts, and forecasts from...

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

This study analyzes the emergence of secular stagnation as the consequence of a rise in the preference for liquidity. Such a rise is caused by a persistent set of pessimistic expectations. This study also investigates the effectiveness of a broad range of demand-management policies in dealing...

In this paper, the author considers the sovereign debt in the form of one-period government bonds with default risk, which can be purchased by and traded among domestic and foreign investors. She shows that the weight assigned to the lenders' interest by the borrowing government at the time of...

A fundamental cause of the global financial crisis was excessive creation of short-term money-like liabilities (quasi-money), notably in shadow banking holdings of sub-prime MBS and other US dollar structured credit instruments and in cross-border flow of capital to the uncompetitive Euro area...

The determinants of default risk of banks in emerging economies have so far received inadequate attention in the literature. This paper seeks to study the determinants of bank asset quality and profitability using panel data techniques and robust data sets for the period between 1997 and 2009....

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...