The search for growth-promoting policies is found to demand knowledge of how growth depends upon actions of entrepreneurs and how these actions depend upon the prevailing institutions. While institutions have extensively been examined for their influences upon the freedoms and the incentives of...

This paper develops a two-country multi-frictional model where the freeze on liquidity access to commercial banks in one country raises unemployment rates via credit rationing in both countries. The expenditure-switching channel, whereby asymmetric monetary shocks traditionally lead to negative...

Credit constraints that link a private agent’s debt to market-determined prices embody a credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and constrained socially optimal equilibria, inducing private agents to overborrow. The externality arises because agents fail to internalize the...

Currently, private trust in commercial banks declines as a consequence of today´s financial crisis. As past crises, e.g. the Asian crisis, show, the loss of confidence in the financial sector typically causes private agents to withdraw their capital from financial institutions. Thus, the...

When the current financial crisis has widened to a global economic crisis an urgent call for implementing financial markets and financial institutions in business cycle models emerged. By modelling commercial banks as a third type of economic agent, we are able to implement the feature of early...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisis definition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severe shortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables. We present a crisis model that is specified for a...

Die Frage nach der Kausalität fällt in die Methodologie. Methodologie ist in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften ein Bereich, der sowohl bei Ökonomen als auch bei Philosophen kaum Beachtung findet. Ökonomik hat sich ursprünglich als eine kausal erklärende Wissenschaft verstanden. Sie wollte für...

Banks increasingly use short-term wholesale funds to supplement traditional retail deposits. Existing literature mainly points to the "bright side" of wholesale funding: sophisticated financiers can monitor banks, disciplining bad but refinancing good ones. This paper models a "dark side" of...