Indicators of trust, confidence, optimism or sentiment among consumers and/or investors, are published continuously in the mass media. More importantly, these indices seem not only to reflect how the state of the real economy is perceived by private agents, but can also help predict the future...

I study the effect of heterogeneous beliefs about asset prices on the long-term behavior of financial markets. Starting from the ideas of Abreu and Brunnermeier (2003), a two-dimensional system of differential equations is developed. The first dynamic variable is the asset price growth rate. The...

This study follows Rotemberg and Woodford (1998) and estimates a three-equation model of output, interest rate and inflation, in order to evaluate alternative rules by which the UK monetary authority may decide on setting the main interest rate. As in the original paper, the model setup is a...

Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...