The financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the banking system of the United States and many large European countries. Canada was a notable exception. In this paper we argue that the structure of financial systems is path dependent. The relative stability of the Canadian banks in the recent crisis...

This paper asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our...

This paper tests the hypothesis that idiosyncratic U.S. disturbances and their international propagation can account for the global depression. Exploiting common stochastic trends in U.S. and Canadian interwar data, the authors estimate a small open economy model for Canada that decomposes...

In 1929, the Canadian government floated the exchange rate, which stayed at parity with sterling until 1931, when the Canadian dollar appreciated with respect to sterling and depreciated with respect to the U.S. dollar. This paper uses Robert J. Barro and David B. Gordon's reputation theory to...

Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States: 1867 to 1960 with Princeton University Press in 1963, to critical acclaim. Since then the book's reputation has grown and it clearly has become one of the most influential volumes in economics in the...

This paper describes the challenges of globalization in terms of the logic underpinning four distinct policy constraints or "trilemmas" and their interrelationship; in particular the disturbances that arise from capital flows and the difficulties of adjusting monetary policies to a global...