In its early years, the Federal Reserve System struggled with making regional considerations subordinate to supraregional considerations. The importance of regional shocks, the strong exposure of banks to their regional economies, and the governance and shareholding structure of the Fed made the...

This paper provides an overview of the relative weight of Europe and East Asia in the context of the world economy and it assesses interdependence between the two regions. The prime motivation of the paper is that linkages between Europe and East Asia remain frequently underestimated. While the...

Economic growth, inflation, and interest rates have declined in Asia, just as they have in the United States and Europe. Sustaining Economic Growth in Asia explores the relevance to several Asian economies of the diagnosis known as “secular stagnation.” Leading experts on the region discuss...

Despite its central importance in the optimal currency area literature, little is known about when and why US regional business cycles became more synchronized. We shed light on these issues by (re)constructing a monthly index of retail sales for the 12 US Federal Reserve districts from 1919 to...

This paper estimates the effects of fiscal stimulus on economic activity using a novel database on large fiscal expansions for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960–2006. The database is constructed by combining the statistical approach to identifying large shifts in fiscal policy with...