This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which...

Mainstream macroeconomic theory understands the economy as a phenomenon tractable by analysis adequately enough to be manageable by macroeconomic policy guided by this analysis. We explore why this epistemological approach of the economy has remained dominant in mainstream economics despite...

Historically high levels of private and public debt coupled with already very low short-term interest rates appear to limit the options for stimulative monetary policy in many advanced economies today. One option that has not yet been considered is monetary financing by central banks to boost...

This paper excavates the set of ideas known as modern monetary theory (MMT). The principal conclusion is that the macroeconomics of MMT is a restatement of elementary well-understood Keynesian macroeconomics. There is nothing new in MMT's construction of monetary macroeconomics that warrants the...

Eric Tymoigne and Randall Wray's (T&W, 2013) defense of MMT leaves the MMT emperor even more naked than before (excuse the Yogi Berra-ism). The criticism of MMT is not that it has produced nothing new. The criticism is that MMT is a mix of old and new, the old is correct and well understood,...

The financial and economic crisis brings to a reconsideration of macroeconomics: as it happened in the past, after the Great Crash of 1929 as well as after the Second World War and after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the subsequent oil crisis. A brief critical survey of...

Recently, there has been a burst of interest in modern money theory (MMT). The essential claim of MMT is sovereign currency issuing governments do not need taxes or bonds to finance government spending and are financially unconstrained. MMT rests on a triad of arguments concerning: (i) the...

The New View on fiscal policy (as coined by Furman 2016) represents a rethinking of the main-stream consensus on the optimal macroeconomic policy mix. It focuses on a reassessment of the relative effectiveness of fiscal policy and its ability to stabilise the economy when monetary policy reaches...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy measures on GDP and the government budget balance in a structural VAR model. In order to identify expenditure shocks we follow Blachard/Perotti (2002) and assume that government expenditure is partly predetermined in the budget. For the...