Japan’s experience shows that very negative circumstances are required for a country to suffer from protracted deflation. The comparison of Japan’s developments in the last few years with those of the US points to large differences, which suggest that the risk of deflation in the US is low....

This paper is a contribution to the literature on the factors behind financial stability, focusing on monetary policy design. In particular, it assesses empirically for a sample of 79 countries in the period 1970 to 2000 whether the choice of the central bank objectives and the monetary policy...

This paper presents a model where agents decide on the timing of replacement of ageing machines. The optimal replacement policy for an agent is influenced by other agents' decisions because the productivity of a particular vintage displays network externalities that set in with a lag. In...