We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

This paper argues that the key deep underlying fundamental for the growing international imbalances leading to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973 was rising U.S. inflation since 1965. It was driven in turn by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies—the elephant in...

This paper describes interactions between monetary and fiscal policies that affect equilibrium price levels and interest rates by critically surveying theories about (a) optimal anticipated inflation, (b) optimal unanticipated inflation, and (c) conditions that secure a "nominal anchor'' in the...

The paper provides a survey of fiscal and monetary policies during the 1930s under the Hoover and Roosevelt Administrations and how they influenced the policies during the recent Great Recession. The discussion of the causal impacts of monetary policy focuses on papers written in the last decade...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

We use new data on manufacturing in Canada to quantify the impact of globalization on the growth and composition of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that industries and regions more exposed to international trade experienced faster growth. Consistent with...

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) – a general purpose technology affecting many industries - has been focused on advances in machine learning, which we recast as a quality-adjusted drop in the price of prediction. How will this sharp drop in price impact society? Policy will...

The United Kingdom will depart from the European Union in March 2019. Numerous open questions remain about details and conditions especially with regard to post-Brexit EU-UK trade relations. In case of a negotiation failure, a "hard Brexit" could cause considerably high costs on both sides of...