Gaps in competitiveness, rooted in economic as well as in political factors, characterise postwar European economic history. The eurozone experience showed the emergence of large current account imbalances. The peculiar mixture of financial markets integration and national cycles in wages and...

The growth and deepening of financial markets entailed the expectation that the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission would lose its importance. The paper explains why, on the contrary, the banking sector has become a major locus of origination and amplification of macro-financial...

Böhm-Bawerk defines the rate of interest as the ratio of intertemporal goods prices, but cannot show the emergence of interest as a financial market price. The alleged efficiency ofroundabout production methods is ill-suited to derive a uniform rate of return of capital. Time preference may...