In the social sciences, the development of a specific social event or structure is often explained by a statistical correlation between an independent variable and a variable assumed to be dependent upon it. This mode of explanation is contested by a methodology of causal reconstruction that...

In the social sciences, the development of a specific social event or structure is often explained by a statistical correlation between an independent variable and a variable assumed to be dependent upon it. This mode of explanation is contested by a methodology of causal reconstruction that...

We quantify the role of financial factors behind the sluggish post-crisis performance of European firms. We use a firm-bank-sovereign matched database to identify separate roles for firm and bank balance sheet weaknesses arising from changes in sovereign risk and aggregate demand conditions. We...

This paper proposes a theory of foreign reserves as macroprudential policy. We study an open-economy model of financial crises in which pecuniary externalities lead to overborrowing, and show that by accumulating international reserves, the government can achieve the constrained-efficient...

This paper puts forward a proposal to help monetary policies confront the challenge of the “normalisation” of money creation and interest rates. The difficult unwinding of years of unorthodox policies put financial stability at risk in major monetary centres and in EMEs. The authors argue...

Behavioral and experimental literature on financial instability focuses on either subjective price expectations (Learning-to-Forecast experiments) or individual trading (Learning-to-Optimize experiments). Bao et al. (2017) have shown that subjects have problems with both tasks. In this paper, I...

The paper argues that financial deregulation incentivized financial firms to take excessive risks and over-expand because it turned social insurance against systemic risk into a common pool (or open) resource. The increased size and complexity of deregulated financial markets in turn raised the...

The authors analyze financial interactions between fundamentalists and chartists within a heterogeneous agent model, focusing on the role of fundamentalists stabilizing prices. In contrast to related studies, which are based on simulations and calculations, they analytically prove that the...