This paper presents a simple decision-theoretic economic approach for analyzing social experiments with compromised random assignment protocols that are only partially documented. We model administratively constrained experimenters who satisfice in seeking covariate balance. We develop...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

Using a large sample of developing and industrialized economies during 1970-1999, this paper explores whether the choice of exchange rate regime affects the sensitivity of local interest rates to international interest rates. In most cases, we cannot reject full transmission of international...

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade; cross-sectional evidence indicates that trade stimulates output. This paper estimates the effect that currency union has, via trade, on output per capita. We use economic and geographic data for over 200...

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included...

This essay considers some prescriptions that are currently popular regarding exchange rate regimes: a general movement toward floating, a general movement toward fixing, or a general movement toward either extreme and away from the middle. The whole spectrum from fixed to floating is covered...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of commodity points' thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the...

Once one recognizes that governments borrow international reserves and exercise other policy options to defend fixed exchange rates during currency crises, the question arises: What factors determine a government's decision to abandon a currency peg or hang on? In a setting of purposeful action...