The evolution of the IMS and IFS in the past several hundred years can be viewed through the lens of the Copernican heliocentric system developed over 500 years ago. We trace out the evolution across regimes of the IMS and IFS in terms of network representations of the Copernican system. We...

Written on the 50th anniversary of floating exchange rates, this paper deals with possible alternatives to a unipolar dollar-based system. It considers (1) measures of international currency use; (2) potential challengers to the dollar; (3) network externalities; and (4) the plausibility of gold...

We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations. When asset markets are illiquid, as modeled via endogenous...

The gold standard emerged as the international monetary system by the end of the 19th century. We formally study its properties in a micro-founded model and find that the scarcity of the world gold stock not only results in a suboptimal output of goods that are purchased with money but also...

Climate change is generating demonstrable harm around the world. Political and legal efforts have sought to associate climate impacts with specific emissions, including in recent international policy discussion of Loss and Damage (L&D). However, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor does...

We use local projections to estimate the cross-country distribution of real GDP per capita growth impulse responses to global and idiosyncratic temperature shocks. Negative growth responses to global temperature at longer horizons are found for all Group of Seven countries while positive...

Valuing deaths caused by climate change in Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) is complex and controversial, having caused disagreement and acrimony in past high-profile settings. Furthermore, it is of first order consequence to the value of the social cost of carbon (SCC). Despite this, the underlying...

Current policies directed at mitigating global warming appear unlikely to prevent temperatures from rising to levels that would trigger a precipitous increase in the costs of climate change. Various attempts at international cooperation to avoid this outcome have failed. Why is this problem so...

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted the economic and political background against which climate and trade policy have been discussed for decades, particularly with respect to questions of climate finance, subsidies and border carbon adjustments. As governments respond to both the...