People adjust to the risks presented by natural disasters in a number of ways; they can move out of harms way, they can self protect, or they can insure. This paper uses Hurricane Andrew, the largest U.S. natural disaster prior to Katrina, to evaluate how people and housing markets respond to a...

This paper is concerned with the reasons why some currencies, such as the pound sterling and the U.S. dollar, have come to serve as "vehicles" for exchanges of other currencies. It develops a three-country model of payments equilibrium with transaction costs, and shows how one currency can...

This paper presents evidence strongly suggesting that the current strength of the dollar reflects myopic behavior by international investors; that is, that part of the dollar's strength can be viewed as a speculative bubble. At some point this bubble will burst, leading to a sharp fall in the...

We show that agglomeration forces can reverse standard international-tax-competition results. Closer integration may result first in a race to the top' and then a race to the bottom, a result that is consistent with recent empirical work showing that the tax gap between rich and poor nations...

There is a broad consensus among US opinion leaders that our economic problem is largely one of failures of international competition -- that trade deficits have eroded our manufacturing base, that inability to sell on world markets has been a major drag on economic growth, and that imports from...

One might expect that differences in income elasticities in trade and/or differences in growth rates among countries would give rise to strong secular trends in real exchange rates; for example, fast-growing countries might need steady depreciation to get the world to accept their growing...

Trigger strategist-s may be defined as act-ors in asset markets who buy or sell when the price reaches a predetermined level ; t-hey include participants in portfolio insurance schemes in equity markets and central banks who intervene to defend an exchange rate target zone. This paper presents...

This paper is an attempt to examine some of the microeconomic foundations of this last view of the link between current accounts and exchange rata. Several authors, especially Kouri and de Macedo (1978), but also more recently Dornbusch (1980), have sought to justify the portfolio approach in...