The current financial crisis is often said to be caused by excessive liquidity and distorted incentives in the US subprime real estate sector. Taking this as a starting point, this paper analyzes the relation between house prices and credit respectively money growth between 1992 and 2006 (West...

A sequence of crises and emergency interest rate cuts has moved global interest rates towards zero and government debt to historical records. We discuss the available options to exit from unconventional monetary policies and unsustainable government debt. First, we shed light on the probability...

Since the outbreak of the financial market crisis central banks all across the world have tried to counteract the economic downturn with at least partly unconventional measures. This contribution reviews the measures taken in the eurozone and points out that the ECB acted less unconventionally...

Property rights are a key aspect of the rules governing economic interactions, providing individuals with dependable information and incentives. Well-defined and stable property rights encourage the effective use of existing scarce resources and also provide the incentive to innovate. In this...

While both errors of overoptimism and errors of overpessimism are possible in the face of imperfect information, the presence of option value from deferring a decision to exchange causes trader errors to be overpessimistically biased. This is problematic because unlike errors of overoptimism,...

The Market Process presents a series of important and innovative articles written by economists of the Austrian School. Covering the gamut of economic issues, including equilibrium theory, free banking, public choice, and the problems of contemporary social reform, the book is an ideal...

Market process theory is principally concerned with explaining how the market moves towards a state of general economic equilibrium and how production and consumption plans become coordinated. Market Process Theories presents in two volumes the most important articles by leading economists which...

The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics is a major new reference work which highlights the common ground between all the branches of the school while demonstrating the breadth and diversity within it. The Companion reflects the many areas where Austrian economists have made contributions,...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...