The Spanish crisis is generally portrayed as resulting from excessive spending by households, associated with a housing bubble and/or excessive welfare spending beyond the economic possibilities of the country. We put forward a different hypothesis. We argue that the Spanish crisis resulted, in...

Keynes had a profound influence on Prebisch in terms of the diagnosis about the main failures of market economies and the need to pursue pro-active and anti-cyclical policies. However, Prebisch was critical of some aspects of Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in...

We argue that a fundamental difference between Post-Keynesian approaches to economic growth lies in their treatment of investment. Kaleckian-Robinsonian models postulate an investment function dependent on the accelerator and profitability. Some of these models rely on the importance of...

Conventional wisdom about the business cycle in Latin America assumes that monetary shocks cause deviations from the optimal path, and that the triggering factor in the cycle is excess credit and liquidity. Further, in this view the origin of the contraction is ultimately related to the excesses...

The Great Depression led to a need to rethink the principles of central banking, as much as it had led to the rethinking of economics in general, with the Keynesian Revolution at the forefront of the theoretical changes. This paper suggests that the role of the monetary authority as a fiscal...

Modern finance has a conceptually unified theoretical core that includes the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), the relationship between risk and return based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Modigliani-Miller theorems (M&M) and the Black-Scholes-Merton approach to option pricing....

The current economic global crisis has thrown fiscal policy onto the center stage. However, the current crisis episode has not produced any change regarding the standing role and function of fiscal policy in developed and developing market economies that has dominated the economics profession...

This paper analyzes Raúl Prebisch's less familiar contributions to economic theory, related to the business cycle, and heavily informed by the Argentinean experience. His views of the cycle emphasize the common nature of the cycle in the center and the periphery as one unified phenomenon. While...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the European debt crisis, which has thus far led to severe adjustment programs crafted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in both Greece and Ireland, was caused by fiscal profligacy on the part of peripheral, or noncore, countries in...

Argentina adopted currency type board arrangements to put an end to monetary instability in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries under very different historical circumstances and contexts with very different results. The first currency board functioned within an international system that...