This paper examines how money growth affects personal consumption using Divisia monetary aggregates. Using monthly U.S. data from 2000 to 2023, we find that changes in Divisia M4 significantly predict personal consumption expenditure, with a lag of three months. A 1% increase in Divisia M4 is...

We propose to pool alternative systemic risk rankings for financial institutions using the method of principal components. The resulting overall ranking is less affected by estimation uncertainty and model risk. We apply our methodology to disentangle the common signal and the idiosyncratic...

In the wake of the still ongoing global financial crisis, bank interdependencies have come into focus in trying to assess linkages among banks and systemic risk. To date, such analysis has largely been based on numerical data. By contrast, this study attempts to gain further insight into bank...

The government debt crisis, erupted in the Eurozone in 2009, nearly led to the collapse of European monetary union. Now that this has been averted, the question is what should be done to make the Eurozone sustainable in the long run. The survival of the Eurozone hinges on the capacity of its...

This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region over the past 20 years, based on the available economic and social indicators, and with its own past economic performance. Among the results it finds that Mexico ranks 18th out of 20 Latin American...

With Spain’s official unemployment rate at 26 percent, and the economy projected to contract by 1.3 percent this year, it is difficult to make the case for continued austerity that could push a barely growing economy back into recession. Yet the government is committed to further fiscal...

The paper attempts an explanation of the alleged "lack of adequate economic models" to predict and eventually avoid - using certain policy recommendations - the recurrent financial and fiscal crises, and finally, economic crisis, recurrently registered in the world. From author opinion, in the...

In this review article of Backhouse and Boianovsky’s book, Transforming modern macroeconomics. Exploring disequilibrium microfoundations, 1956-2003, I make the following points: (a) Backhouse and Boianovsky’s too broad understanding of the disequilibrium approach results in their bringing...

This working paper reconsiders and adds to empirical evidence on the effect of federal government debt and interest rates.

In this paper, the differences between two variations of proportional representation (PR), open-list PR and closed-list PR, are analyzed in terms of their ability to accurately reflect voter preference. The single nontransferable vote (SNTV) is also included in the comparison as a benchmark. We...