The Greek bail-out was highly controversial. An oft-heard assessment is that i) the bail-out was a mistake, ii) the political haggling over it was irrational and iii) the bail-out will create a moral hazard problem. Contrary to this view, our analysis suggests that, given EMU's present...

Previous research on optimal R&D subsidies has focussed on the long run. This paper characterizes the optimal time path of R&D subsidization in a semi-endogenous growth model, by exploiting a recently developed numerical method. Starting from the steady state under current R&D subsidization in...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities sides. The...

The Pessimists and the Optimists disagree whether the US external deficits and the associated buildup of US net foreign liabilities are problems that require urgent attention. A warning signal should be that the debt ratio deviates significantly from the optimal ratio. The optimal debt ratio or...

We develop uncertainty indices for the United States and Australia based on freely accessible, real time Google Trends data. Our Google Trends Uncertainty (GTU) indices are found to be positively correlated to a variety of alternative proxies for uncertainty available for these two countries....

We formulate a simple theoretical model of a banking industry that we use to identify and construct theory-based measures of systemic bank shocks (SBS). These measures differ from “banking crisis” (BC) indicators employed in many empirical studies, which are constructed using primarily...