This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

The European Central Bank's activities as lender of last resort are especially controversial in Germany. The overriding concern of the critics is an alleged tendency of creating moral hazard on the side of public and private borrowers in the European Monetary Union. This contrasts with the...

Around 50 years ago, Edmund Phelps and Robert Lucas proposed an answer to the question why changes in aggregate nominal spending bring about output and employment effects, instead of purely proportional variations in prices. The Phelps-Lucas monetary misperception hypothesis asserted that...