Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has become a policy priority. Despite the efforts made, policymakers are still a long way from developing a satisfactory operational framework. A major challenge complicating this task is the "fuzziness" with which financial...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...