This paper quantifies the relative dominance of global currencies and the competitive structure of the international monetary system since 1825. I find the post-1945 experience of dollar hegemony to have no historical precedent. No currency has ever maintained such a large, long-lasting lead...

The advent and spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) increase potential output growth. It is uncertain to what extent and for how long they do so. We use the term "new economy" (NE) to describe the acceleration in potential output growth and the attendant and partly...

We investigate the stability of M3 income velocity in the euro area. We apply a set of breakpoint procedures to examine this issue and conclude that at least one structural change occurred around 2000-2001. We also find evidence of another structural break around 1992-1993. These two breaks seem...

What factors cause banks to lend to the private sector in a bank-based financial system like the ones in place in Europe? In this paper we compare a traditional demand oriented model to a non-traditional capital budgeting model of bank lending based on movements in the equity cost of capital for...

We analyse the redistribution channel of a money-financed versus debt-financed fiscal stimulus in a Borrower-Saver frammework. The redistribution channel is larger when we consider a money-financed fiscal stimulus. However, it generates also larger welfare losses than a debt-financed fiscal...

Using a new survey of firms’ inflation expectations in France, we provide novel evidence about the measurement and formation of inflation expectations on the part of firms. First, French firms report inflation expectations with a smaller, but still positive, bias than households and display...

In an otherwise unique-equilibrium model, agents are segmented into a few informational islands according to the signal they receive about others' expectations. Even if agents perfectly observe fundamentals, rational-exuberance equilibria (REX) can arise as they put weight on expectational...

Though most central banks actively intervene on the foreign exchange market, the literature offers mixed evidence on their effectiveness: particularly for unannounced interventions. We use new, declassified data from the archives of the Bank of England and the institutional features of the...

This paper analyzes the business cycle behavior of the corporate debt structure and its interaction with economic recovery. The debt structure is measured as the share of bonds in the total credit to non-financial corporations for a quarterly panel of countries over the period 1989-2013. We...

This paper shows that when agents learn from prices, large private uncertainty may result from a small amount of heterogeneity. As in a Phelps-Lucas island model, final producers look at the prices of their local inputs to infer aggregate conditions. However, market linkages between islands make...