This paper asks why modern finance theory and the efficient market hypothesis have failed to explain long-term carry trades; persistent asset bubbles or zero lower bounds; and financial crises. It extends Keen (Solving the Paradox of Monetary Profits, 2010) and the Theory of the Monetary Circuit...

Traditionally, observed fluctuations in aggregate economic time series have been mainly modelled as being the result of exogenous disturbances. A better understanding of macroeconomic phenomena, however, surely requires looking directly at the relations between variables that may trigger...

Empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure is in-conclusive and its validity widely debated. Using a cointegrated VAR model of US treasury yields, this paper extends a common approach to test the theory. If, as we find, spreads between two yields are non-stationary,...

This paper studies the effects of credit supply disruptions in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework. First, this paper examines the effects of credit supply disruptions in the business sector. The model with financially constrained households generates a bigger decline in...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...

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....

We analyze the interaction of stock market movements and politics in Germany. In contrast to the empirical evidence available for the U.S., we do not find that German stock market returns tend to be higher during liberal than during conservative governments. Also in contrast to results for the...

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...

The provision of credit has been shown to be eminent for macroeconomic activity.Recent research highlighted that optimism may play a role in the provision of credit through leverage cycles. A decomposition of corporate bond spreads allows the modelling of a propensity-to-lend through an excess...

This paper proposes the econometric evaluation of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in the euro area, under a particular specification of the adaptive learning hypothesis. The key assumption is that agents? perceived law of motion is a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model, whose coefficients...