Ernst & Young's 2013 Fraud Survey has yielded some ugly results. 60% of the 3,000 board members and managers surveyed around the world said that the pressure to report positive financial outcomes had increased in the last 12 months. This is a delicate way of saying that owners and senior managers are prepared to do…

Every now and then reports on falling hourly labor costs in euro periphery countries surface and make newspaper headlines. Headlines sometimes express falling labor costs as good news, and other times as bad news, depending on who does the interpreting. Falling labor costs may be considered good news because they indicate that it is cheaper…

The other day, a reporter asked me three questions about the current state of Spanish and European banking. Among all the areas of economic analysis, I find monetary economics and banking most interesting. In 1992, together with three coauthors, I published one of the first articles about general equilibrium economics that had the word “banking”…