Policy interest rates do not have to be short. The means by which monetary authorities influence prices and quantities can differ, but the obstacles to altering one rather than the other are not insuperable. Inflation is sluggish, and expectations of future interest rates—long and short,...

This paper proposes that all new euro area sovereign borrowing be in the form of jointly guaranteed eurobonds. To avoid classic moral hazard problems and to insure the guarantors against default, each country would pay a risk premium conditional on economic fundamentals to a joint debt...

This article aims to illuminate two sets of consumption puzzles. The first concerns the behavior of aggregate saving rates in the 1980s and early 1990s: collapse and rebound in Scandinavia and the U.K., and, apparently, a more secular decline in the U.S. The second set of puzzles concerns...

Despite convergence pressures, differences in housing and financial market institutions across the 15 member states of the European Union are still enormous. This paper argues that they have profound effects on the responsiveness of output and inflation in the different countries to changes in...