Using a simple case study approach. this paper compares the conduct and performance of monetary policy in six Industrialized countries since the breakup of the Bretton Woods system. Our purpose is to develop fruitful hypotheses that might usefully be explored in subsequent, more formal research....

This paper extends previous work on the information in the term structure at longer maturities to other countries besides the United states, using a newly constructed data set for 1 to 5 year interest rates from Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. Even with wide differences in inflation...

We dissect the impact of a large and sudden exchange rate appreciation on Swiss border import prices, retail prices, and consumer expenditures on domestic and imported non-durable goods, following the removal of the EUR/CHF floor in January 2015. Cross-sectional variation in border price changes...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany's working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany's class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life...

In the last four decades, women have made major inroads into occupations previously dominated by men. This paper examines whether occupational feminization is accompanied by a decline in wages: Do workers suffer a wage penalty if they remain in, or move into, feminizing occupations? We analzye...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...

This paper examines the historical evolution of central bank credibility using both historical narrative and empirics for a group of 16 countries, both advanced and emerging. It shows how the evolution of credibility has gone through a pendulum where credibility was high under the classical gold...