We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that on average...

The financial crisis and its ensuing effects have brought back into the limelight the issue of cycles and of policies which fuel or mitigate crises. Cognitive and operational models in economics and business are questioned. There is a specter of much lower economic growth in the industrialized...

This article examines the misconceptions about modern money theory (MMT) put forward by . The author divides her critique into three categories. First, the Drumetz/Pfister article erroneously indicates that MMT focuses exclusively on the means-of-payment function of money, that it considers...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

The financial crisis and its ensuing effects have brought back into the limelight the issue of cycles and of policies which fuel or mitigate crises. Cognitive and operational models in economics and business are questioned. There is a specter of much lower economic growth in the industrialized...

This article examines the misconceptions about modern money theory (MMT) put forward by . The author divides her critique into three categories. First, the Drumetz/Pfister article erroneously indicates that MMT focuses exclusively on the means-of-payment function of money, that it considers...

This thesis was written by Jakob Eberl while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2015 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2016. The...

This paper looks at three countries that have been hard-hit by the world economic recession, and have turned to the IMF for assistance: Hungary, Latvia, and Ukraine. In all of these countries, it would appear that there were more sensible responses to the crisis that would reduce the loss of...

This paper studies the design of optimal fiscal policy when a government that fully trusts the probability model of government expenditures faces a fearful public that forms pessimistic expectations. We identify two forces that shape our results. On the one hand, the government has an incentive...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. The authors consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public...