The ECB has been arguing in the past that since there is no trade-off between price stability and financial stability, the pursuit of price stability is the best a central bank can do to also maintain financial stability. We argue that there is a potential trade-off between price stability and...

I distinguish two types of macroeconomic models. The first type are top-down models in which some or all agents are capable of understanding the whole picture and use this superior information to determine their optimal plans. The second type are bottom-up models in which all agents experience...

When entering a monetary union, member-countries change the nature of their sovereign debt in a fundamental way, i.e. they cease to have control over the currency in which their debt is issued. As a result, financial markets can force these countries' sovereigns into default. In this sense...

The sovereign debt crisis has made it clear that central banking is more than keeping inflation low. Central banks are also responsible for financial stability. An essential tool in maintaining financial stability is provided by the capacity of the central bank to be the lender of last resort in...

Capitalism is characterized by booms and busts. Periods of strong growth in output alternate with periods of declines in economic growth. Every macro-economic theory should attempt to explain these endemic business cycle movements. In this paper I present two paradigms that attempt to explain...

In this paper we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a...

We develop a simple model of the exchange rate in which agents optimize their portfolio and use different forecasting rules. They check the profitability of these rules ex post and select the more profitable one. This model produces two kinds of equilibria, a fundamental and a bubble one. In a...

We analyze the similarities and the differences in the fragility of the European Monetary system (EMS) and the Eurozone. We test the hypothesis that in the EMS the fragility arose from the absence of a credible lender of last resort in the foreign exchange markets while in the Eurozone it was...

In this paper we extend the behavioral macroeconomic model as proposed by De Grauwe (2012) to include a banking sector. The behavioral model takes the view that agents have limited cognitive limitations. As a result, it is rational to use simple forecasting rules and to subject the use of these...