The electronification of retail payments has been rapid in Finland. The use of payment cards and credit transfers is very common. However, cash is still used quite widely, especially for small value purchases. There are no statistics available on values or numbers of cash payments, because cash...

It is widely recognised that fiscal policy will have greater responsibilities for cyclical stabilisation in the EMU, given the loss of the monetary instrument at national level. At the same time, the EMU’s budgetary framework emphasises the need to rely on automatic fiscal stabilisers, rather...

Using recently developed modelling methodology of Economic Tracking Portfolios (ETP), we find that it is possible to forecast future values of inflation and changes in industrial production in the United States and at least three core euro countries – Italy, France and Germany – utilising...

Is commercial banking in the traditional sense obsolete? Are we in fact witnessing the emergence of a fundamentally new era of finance and payments intermediation? These questions are raised in this paper. Instead of a formal analysis, an attempt is made here to approach these questions from a...

We study the role of labour and credit market imperfections in the determination of equilibrium unemployment. In the credit market, loan contracts are negotiated between financiers and firms, both of which have bargaining power, while firms and organized labour bargain over the base wage. The...

We present a model of risky debt in which collateral value is correlated with the possibility of default. The model is then used to study: 1) the expected amount of debt recovered in the event of default as a function of collateral; and 2) the amount of collateral needed to mitigate the...