We write this essay for both lay readers and scientists, though mainstream economists are welcome to enjoy it too. Our subject is the basic toolbox of mainstream economics. The most important tools in this box are demand, supply and equilibrium. All mainstream economists – as well as many...

This paper considers a prototypical monetary business cycle model for the U.S. economy, in which the equilibrium is undetermined if monetary policy is ‘inactive? In previous multivariate studies it has been common practice to restrict parameter estimates to values for which the equilibrium is...

Based on a classification of countries and territories according to their regime and anchor currency choice, the study considers the two major currency blocs of the present world. A nested logit regression suggests that long-term structural economic variables determine a given country's currency...

Based on the equilibrium correction structure of a cointegrated vector autoregression it is rejected that US monetary policy 1988-2002 can be described by a traditional Taylor (1993) rule. Instead we find a stable long-term relationship between the Federal funds rate, the unemployment rate, and...

Most wage-contracting models with rational expectations fail to replicate the persistence in inflation observed in the data. We argue that coordination problems and multiple equilibria are the keys to explaining inflation persistence. We develop a wage-contracting model in which workers are...