In 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In that work, he anticipated the collapse of the first era of globalization that began in the mid-nineteenth century. He admonished the short-sighted assumption that these years of relative peace and...

The economic emergence of a fixed exchange rate periphery in Asia has reestablished the United States as the center country in the Bretton Woods international monetary system. We argue that the normal evolution of the international monetary system involves the emergence of a periphery for which...

We use time-series methods to estimate a simple aggregate-supply aggregate-demand model in order to analyze the comparative performance of fixed- and flexible-exchange-rate systems and test competing hypotheses designed to explain shifts between exchange-rate regimes. The paper provides a...

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...

The collapse of the gold standard in the 1930s sparked a debate about the merits of fixed versus floating exchange rates. Yet the debate quickly vanished: there was almost no discussion about the exchange rate regime at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 because John Maynard Keynes and Harry...