This volume focuses on the crucial relationships between domestic and international economic developments and on their implications for monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies.

The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

The U.S. Federal Reserve responded to the great recession by reducing policy rates to the effective lower bound. In order to provide further monetary stimulus, they subsequently conducted large-scale asset purchases, quadrupling their balance sheet in the process. We assess the international...

In its efforts to faces the challenges of emerging from the crisis, the EU tries to put the European economies on a sustainable growth path through the 2014-2020 Common Strategic Framework (CSF), sought as an instrument for implementing the Europe 2020 Strategy. According to the CSF thematic...

Shadow banking, an informal, largely unregulated, financial market, has become increasingly important in China because the fact that it is largely unregulated can threaten the viability of the financial system. This study discusses various issues involved in Chinese shadow banking, including the...

This study investigates the valuation impact of a firm’s decision to cross list on a more (or less) prestigious stock exchange relative to its own domestic market. We use a network analysis methodology to derive broad market-based measures of prestige for 45 country or regional stock exchange...

This paper explores the potential impact of the Federal Reserve Board’s decision on interest rates on the budget deficit. The first part recounts the history of the 1990s surplus, correcting the widely held misunderstanding that this surplus was achieved by the Clinton administration’s tax...

In this paper, we study the impact of extreme events on the loan portfolios of the Greek banking system. These portfolios are grouped into three separate groups based on the size of the bank to which they belong, in particular, large, medium, and small size. A series of extreme scenarios was...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the slowdown in the Italian total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis focusses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the dynamics of the TFP. This analysis can not be done with Cobb—Douglas technology but...