The paper provides an overview of the sovereign debt crisis. I first consider the build-up of the crisis. I then discuss policy choices when a financial crisis erupts and assess the adjustment processes in the crisis countries, including alternatives to policies of austerity. Finally I take up...

There are numerous political economy approaches to the question of delayed stabilizations. However, all these approaches regard inflation as the unintentional result of the behavior of interest groups. In this paper we take the opposite view, namely, that when there is polarization of financial...

I evaluate the effect of inflation targeting on inflation and how it interacts with product market deregulation during the disinflationary process in the 1990s. Using a sample of 21 OECD countries, I show that, after controlling for product market deregulation, the effect of inflation targeting...

This paper carries out an empirical investigation of the impact on bond spreads of the announcement, purchases and exit from the Swiss National Bank’s bond purchase program in 2009–2010. We find evidence in favor of a narrowing yield spread of covered bonds as a result of the program. The...

Recent empirical work on the 2008–09 financial crisis has found mixed results on the usefulness of indicators to explain the cross-country variation in the incidence of the crisis in non-originating countries. While some authors have found success with various indicators, Rose and Spiegel...

This paper examines the relationship among deficit-financing fiscal policy, risk and economic growth in a stochastic endogenous growth model with private and public capital. We show that there are positive balanced-growth rate and a debt-to-GDP ratio that depend on deep parameters such as the...

This paper argues that the effect of a financial stimulus on growth can vary along quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. We support this argument by presenting a theoretical finance–growth model, mainly inspired by Pagano (1993) and Canarella and Pollard (2004), where quantile...

We analyse the relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and real per capita GDP growth for euro area members and a broader set of industrial countries by distinguishing periods of sustainable and non-sustainable debt. Thresholds for debt are theory-driven and depend on macroeconomic...

This paper aims at explaining why the CFA countries have successfully maintained a currency union for several decades, despite failing to meet many of optimum currency area criteria. We suggest that the CFA zone, while not optimal, has been at least sustainable. We test this sustainability...

Based on panel smooth transition regressions, this paper determines for a large sample of developed and emerging countries, the value of currency misalignments from which we observe a regime shift in economic growth, over the 1980–2009 period. Misalignments, defined as the difference between...