This paper develops a restrictive procedure for evaluating economic policy decisions, by comparing actual economic history to a simulated history where a specific policy decision is replaced with a counterfactual, but credible, alternative. Our procedure is theoretically straightforward, but...

The Eurozone needs a bank resolution regime that can work across seventeen independent nations of diverse sizes with varying levels of financial development, limited fiscal co-responsibility, and with systemic instability induced by quick and low-cost deposit transfers across borders. We...

The owner of a residential property subject to a nonrecourse mortgage essentially has a put option against the market value of the property. If the market price of the property falls sufficiently, the owner can surrender the property to the mortgage issuer and in exchange receive full offset of...

During the years 2003 to 2008, the Irish domestic financial sector experienced a very fast and poorly controlled expansion, followed by a dramatic collapse. The causes of the Irish credit bubble and bust have been exhaustively examined; see for example Connor et al. (2012), Honohan (2010), Nyberg...