There have been increasing warnings lately that the world economy is in danger of disintegrating. How realistic are such fears? Could the world's trading partners have a serious interest in such a development and be prepared to accept the risks involved? The following three articles seek to...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

(From introduction). By many standards, economic and monetary union (EMU) is a major success. The transition to the new currency was remarkably smooth. The euro area has enjoyed remarkable price stability. After several years of disappointing economic performance between 2001 and 2005, growth...

There have been increasing warnings lately that the world economy is in danger of disintegrating. How realistic are such fears? Could the world's trading partners have a serious interest in such a development and be prepared to accept the risks involved? The following three articles seek to...

To ward off the threat of a worldwide depression that loomed at the end of the 2000s, governments opted to run up substantial fiscal deficits. In doing so, they sowed the seeds of the sovereign debt crisis. Saddled with often high debt burdens and modest growth prospects, developed countries'...

This book provides an update to the major 2012 study by the same authors on the dual role of the public sector as the provider of the ultimate riskless asset and, at the same time, the source of a potential major systemic risk. In this second edition, Brender and his colleagues concentrate again...