The recent financial and sovereign debt crises around the world have sparked a growing literature on models and empirical estimates of defaultable debt. Frequently households and firms come under default threat, local governments can default, and recently sovereign default threats were eminent...

The high degree of persistence in the national inflation differentials of the majority of EMU Member States observed since the introduction of the euro has raised serious concerns among researchers and policy-makers alike. In this paper the main theoretical arguments which explain the existence...

In a Post-Keynesian (PK) model we show that inflation targeting monetary policies, as the main stabilisation tool proposed by the New Consensus Model (NCM), in the short run are only adequate for certain values of the model parameters, but are either unnecessary, counterproductive, or limited in...

In this paper a dynamic probit model for recession forecasing under pseudo-real time is set up using a large set of macroeconomic and financial monthly indicators for Germany. Using different initial sets of explanatory variables, alternative dynamic probit specifications are obtained through an...

This paper studies the dynamics of macroeconomic risk, fiscal policy and the macroeconomy in a two-country monetary union framework, under the assumption that agents do not have rational expectations, but use heuristics to determine their consumption over time, as well as to assess macroeconomic...

The dichotomous characterization of the business cycle in recessions and expansions has been central in the literature over the last fifty years. However, there are various reasons to question the adequacy of this dichotomous approach for our understanding of business cycle dynamics, as well as...

In this paper the role of behavioral forecasting rules of chartist and fun-damentalist type for the dynamic macroeconomic stability of a two-country system is investigated both analytically and numerically. The main result of the paper is that for large trend-chasing parameters in the chartist...