The paper contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income of and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that...

Whereas existing literature has documented strong correlations between national incomes and measures of schooling attainment, causality has been hard to pin down. Much of empirical work had tended to interpret these correlations as implying an effect of human capital on national income, but...

The measurement of national income has added greatly to our understanding of economic and social change in Europe over the past hundred years. But national income analysis does not take full account of changes in welfare and particularly of the causes and effects of long-term changes in the...

We use the method of indirect inference, using the bootstrap, to test the Smets and Wouters model of the EU against a VAR auxiliary equation describing their data; the test is based on the Wald statistic. We find that their model generates excessive variance compared with the data. But their...

How much of carry trade excess returns can be explained by the presence of disaster risk? To answer this question, we propose a simple structural model that includes both Gaussian and disaster risk premia and can be estimated even in samples that do not contain disasters. The model points to a...

While the global financial crisis was centered in the United States, it led to a surprising appreciation in the dollar, suggesting global dollar illiquidity. In response, the Federal Reserve partnered with other central banks to inject dollars into the international financial system. Empirical...

This paper surveys the evidence on the effectiveness of monetary transmission in developing countries. We summarize the arguments for expecting the bank lending channel to be the dominant means of monetary transmission in such countries, and present a simple model that suggests why this channel...

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal policy and the current account, drawing on a larger country sample than in previous studies and using panel regressions, vector auto-regressions, and an analysis of large fiscal and external adjustments. On average, a strengthening in the...

This paper analyses several procedures for fixing conversion rates at the start of EMU. One consists of announcing a fixed conversion rate; a second (proposed by Lalmfalussy) would announce that the conversion rate will be an average of past market exchange rates; and a third involves announcing...

This paper analyses the constraints on the choice of the conversion rates resulting from the fact that the external value of the Ecu cannot be changed at the start of the third stage of EMU and that one Ecu must be converted into one Euro. These constraints force the authorities to accept the...