The developed economies of Japan, the United States, and the Eurozone are currently experiencing very low short-term rates, so low that they are considered to be at the “zero lower bound” of possibility. This effectively paralyzes conventional monetary policy. As a consequence, monetary...

This paper estimates a nonlinear Threshold-VAR to investigate if a Keynesian liquidity trap due to a speculative motive was in place in the U.S. Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. We find clear evidence in favor of a breakdown of the liquidity effect after an unexpected increase in...

The core problem of both the Great Depression and the 2008/2009 economic crisis was deflation. A review of the Great Depression examines the long, slow intellectual and political process that finally led to a correct understanding of how deflation arose and the difficulty of addressing it with...

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Selfful filling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

This paper estimates a series of shocks to hit the US economy during the Great Depression, using a New Keynesian model with unemployment and bargaining frictions. Shocks to long-run inflation expectations appear to account for much of the cyclical behavior of employment, while an increase in...

I provide a framework for understanding debt deleveraging in a group of _nancially integrated countries. During an episode of international deleveraging world consumption demand is depressed and the world interest rate is low, reecting a high propensity to save. If exchange rates are allowed to...

This paper estimates a series of shocks to hit the US economy during the Great Depression, using a New Keynesian model with unemployment and bargaining frictions. Shocks to long-run inflation expectations appear to account for much of the cyclical behavior of employment, while an increase in...

We examine global dynamics under infinite-horizon learning in New Keynesian models where the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. As in Evans, Guse and Honkapohja (2008), the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Unstable deflationary paths emerge after...

Safe asset shortages can expose the economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality of the bond premium. Self-fulfilling liquidity traps are associated with a counter-cyclical bond premium. Small issuances of government debt crowd out private debt and...

We examine the effects of various borrower-based macroprudential tools in a New Keynesian environment where both real and nominal interest rates are low. Our model features long-term debt, housing transaction costs and a zero-lower bound constraint on policy rates. We find that the long-term...