Inflation targeting was adopted by several countries, including Sweden, in the 1990s. We evaluate the Swedish inflation targeting regime since 1995 using a novel approach based on a unique data set on the characteristics of collective wage agreements between 1908 and 2008. First, we establish...

This paper evaluates inflation forecasts made by Norges Bank which is recognized as a successful forecast targeting central bank. It is reasonable to expect that Norges Bank produces inflation forecasts that are on average better than other forecasts, both 'naïve' forecasts, and forecasts from...

In this paper the authors recall the history of Jubilee debt cancellations, emphasizing what their social purpose was at that time. They note that it would not be possible to copy that procedure exactly nowadays, primarily because most debt/credit relationships are intermediated via financial...

While there seems to be a well-established consensus about the underlying causes to the Greek crisis, less is known about internal and external transmission mechanisms that ultimately caused unemployment to increase rapidly over this period. Motivated by the structural slumps theory in Phelps...

Much of the literature on the effect of housing wealth on consumption has been embedded in a simple life-cycle model in which housing price changes work as a wealth effect. In such models, windfall gains in housing always lead to positive changes in consumption. However, this might constitute a...

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using the resulting sample of...

In this paper the authors present an agent-based model of a credit network economy. The artificial economy includes different economic agents that interact using simple behavioral rules through various markets, i.e., the consumption goods market, the labor market, the credit market and the...

Current macro-models based on the demand-side effects of monetary policy and sticky prices account for the observed correlations between policy interest rates, output and inflation, but they fail with regard to other empirical regularities, such as the negative effects of policy shocks on real...

Credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms are studied for the structure and its temporal change from the year 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite graph where edges correspond to the relationships and weights refer to the amounts...

Bruun and Heyn-Johnsen (2009) state the paradox that economics has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of how monetary profits are generated, even though the generation of a physical surplus is an established aspect of non-neoclassical economics. They emphasise that our ability to...