This paper provides an outlook for the Indian economy in the light of the extraordinary global financial crisis, that started in the US, but which has now transformed into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Indian economy was slowing down even before the onset of global...

Despite signs of recovery from the global financial crisis, the GDP growth rate for the Indian economy is likely to be between 5.8 to 6.1 per cent in 2009-10, below the 6.7 per cent recorded in fiscal 2008-09. While there has been an improvement in Indian industry, particularly the manufacturing...

Credit constraints that link a private agent’s debt to market-determined prices embody a credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and constrained socially optimal equilibria, inducing private agents to overborrow. The externality arises because agents fail to internalize the...

The paper describes boom-and-bust cycles within Hayek's framework of order and aims to provide an understanding of recurring crises in recent financial history. We argue that a boom-and-bust cycle is initiated by a displacement that lowers the degree of (ex-post) plan coherence (or order) in an...

In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the...

This paper examines the link between banking structure and financial fragility across Europe during the 1920s and 1930s using a new database. Monthly and annual data are analyzed to show that countries with universal banking were more likely to experience crises. Furthermore, those countries...

Since the 2008 crisis, the economics literature has shown a renewed interest in Keynes's "beauty contest" (BC) as a fundamental aspect of the functioning of financial markets. We argue that to understand the importance of the BC, psychological and informational factors are of small importance,...

Trust in financial institutions is of great importance for financial intermediation. Against this background, we study two questions: Has trust in banks declined during the global financial crisis and what factors determine the level of trust in banks? Employing survey evidence from Austrian...

I provide a framework for understanding debt deleveraging in a group of _nancially integrated countries. During an episode of international deleveraging world consumption demand is depressed and the world interest rate is low, reecting a high propensity to save. If exchange rates are allowed to...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...