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...

This essay analyzes the economic causes and effects of household decisions concerning fertility, education and child labor when children can supplement family income early in life and must support their parents in old age as adults. Parents, who raise and educate children for both financial and...

Recent articles in International Organization and elsewhere have explored the role of domestic institutions in shaping exchange rate regime choice. These articles use some variation on the information reported by governments to the International Monetary Fund as their dependent variable. Even...

This paper examines data for stock prices and price levels of 14 developed countries during the post-WWII era and compares their behavior in that sample with behavior over the past two centuries in the UK and the US. Contrary to much of the literature of the past several decades, we find that...

A model of national price levels is developed to lay bare implicit assumptions behind the conventional view on the effect of productivity differentials and net foreign assets. The effect of productivity on national price levels is determined by the interaction of several countervailing channels,...

In this paper, we examine the reaction of stock market returns and volatility in a diverse group of six emerging markets to a set of IMF events. In particular, we test within a panel framework whether there was an "investor panic" causing a significant drop in stock market returns on the days of...