This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...

In the financial crisis literature, it is usually argued that, contrary to the case of currency crises, building a time series index to identify banking crisis episodes is highly difficult, particularly because of the lack of reliable data on banking sector variables (non-performing loans,...

The paper distinguishes between the classic or traditional foreign banks with their emphasis on corporate and wholesale banking, and the innovators responding to transition, deregulation or crisis in emerging markets. The innovators come in three varieties—bettors, prospectors and...

In recent years, wavelets have become widely used in physics, engineering, and mathematics. They have been used for signal processing, image processing, numerical computation, and data compression. Wavelets have not, however, been used very much in the fields of Economics, Econometrics, and...

We present several Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods that have been widely used in recent years in econometrics and statistics. Among these is the Gibbs sampler, which has been of particular interest to econometricians. Although the paper summarizes some of the relevant theoretical...

The essential idea of equilibrium search models of labour market behaviour is that wage policy matters. In contrast, the stylized neoclassical competitive model predicts that firms paying a wage above the competitive equilibrium will disappear; those offering less will attract no workers. The...

We have collected data on the one-year-ahead income expectations of members of American households in our Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE), a module of a national continuous telephone survey conducted at the University of Wisconsin. The income- expectations questions take this form: "What...

The authors examine the issue of lag-length selection in the context of a structural vector autoregression (VAR) and a vector error-correction model with long-run restrictions. First, they show that imposing long- run restrictions implies, in general, a moving-average (MA) component in the...