Like many countries, Spain has gone through a series of financial crises, both before and after its industrialization. There are many underlying causes for these crises, as well as for the current Spanish downturn. It is worth noting that there are similarities between recessions throughout the...

Although it is an insufficiently defined concept, the economic governance seems to play an extremely important role both for the future of the European continent, and for all the countries of the world. The current economic and financial crisis revealed numerous difficulties of the current...

We develop a model in which, in order to provide managerial incentives, it is optimal to have costly bankruptcy. If benevolent governments can commit to their policies, it is optimal not to interfere with private contracts. Such policies are time inconsistent in the sense that, without...

This note discusses recent theoretical work analyzing the causes of financial instability, its consequences for the macroeconomy, and thus the potential role for macroprudential policy. After discussing how information asymmetries and strategic complementarities can cause balance sheet losses to...

This paper shows that an increase in banks' holdings of domestic sovereign debt decreases the ability of domestic sovereigns to successfully enact bailouts. When sovereigns finance bailouts with newly issued debt and the price of sovereign debt is sensitive to unanticipated debt issues, then...

Italian Abstract: Questo pamphlet è un breviario di sopravvivenza intellettuale per difendersi dalla disinformazione e dal mito dell'Euro. Il disegno dell'Eurozona si fonda su un'architettura economica irrazionale derivata da principi di liberismo economico che da più trent'anni sono egemonici...

Infrequent but turbulent episodes of outright sovereign default on domestic creditors are considered a “forgotten history” in Macroeconomics. We propose a heterogeneous-agents model in which optimal debt and default on domestic and foreign creditors are driven by distributional incentives...

Iceland was a high inflation country from the second half of the seventies and until the middle of the eighties. During the middle of the nineties inflation in Iceland, at less than 2% p.a., was among the lowest in the OECD. In this paper we analyse the roots of high inflation in Iceland and the...

Since the Seventies, increases in public debt and deficits have raised concern about their effects on interest rates. Growing public debt and persistent deficits would have led to inflation pressures, which would have forced central Banks to raise the short-term interest rate. Expectations of...

Infrequent but turbulent episodes of outright sovereign default on domestic creditors are considered a ?forgotten history? in macroeconomics. We propose a heterogeneous- agents model in which optimal debt and default on domestic and foreign creditors are driven by distributional incentives and...