Mainstream macro-models have assumed away financial frictions, in particular default. The minimum addition in order to introduce financial intermediaries, money and liquidity into such models is the possibility of default. This, in turn, requires that institutions and price formation mechanisms...

In this paper we propose a novel way to model the labor market in the context of a New-Keynesian general equilibrium model, incorporating labor market frictions in the form of hiring and firing costs. We show that such a model is able to replicate many important stylized facts of the business...

Together with institutional, functional and organizational independence, financial independence constitutes one of the cornerstones of central bank independence, the economic ratio of which has been demonstrated extensively in the literature. In broad terms financial independence may be defined...

Bitcoin is a scarce digital asset: more of a cryptocommodity than a cryptocurrency, it represents the equivalent of digital gold. It is used as money, as gold has always been, but it is not a good unit of account: extreme deflationary price instability has hampered its usability, making it...

Demonetization is a process of extraction of a particular form of currency from circulation. The current form of money is pulled out from circulation and retired, to be replaced with new notes or coins. The latest demonetization measures taken by the Indian Government on November 8th 2016, in an...

Humans act based on the ideas they adopt and apply to circumstance with the intensity of action derived from the associated emotions. It follows that in any society the presentation of the ideas to citizens a major driver of citizen opinion and hence a major driver of social development. After...

Saudi Arabia is a fiscally dominant open economy. The exchange rate anchor provides the long -term framework for monetary policy. There is only limited scope to diverge from US interest rates but SAMA retains flexibility in deploying prudential guidelines, adjusting reserve requirements and...

On December 3, 2015, Mario Draghi, President European Central Bank (ECB), claims: “we are doing more because it works, not because it fails.” Really true or not?To help assess and further promote the very basics of money calculus, as well as an impetus to improve the actions taken by...

Bitcoin has enabled competition between digital cryptocurrencies and traditional legal tender fiat currencies. Despite rapidly increasing acceptance, so far the affirmation of cryptocurrency as better money has been thwarted by dramatic deflationary price instability. Successful at disposing of...