We present updated estimates of central bank for 100 countries up through 2006 and use them to analyze both the determinants and consequences of monetary policy transparency in an integrated econometric framework. We establish that there has been significant movement in the direction of greater...

Greater transparency in central bank operations is the most dramatic change in the conduct of monetary policy in recent years. In this paper we present new information on its extent and effects. We show that the trend is general: a large number of central banks have moved in the direction of...

In this paper we reassess the cyclical performance of the French economy in the 1920s, focusing in particular on the period 1926-1931 and on France's resistance to the Great Depression. France expanded rapidly after 1926 and, unlike the other leading industrial economies, resisted the onset of...

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. It may still be too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy responses, but it is possible to analyze monetary and fiscal policies in the...

How will free trade affect monetary policy and exchange rate regime choices in the Americas? While the European Union illustrates how the creation of an integrated market in goods and services can enhance monetary cooperation and integration, it is not clear that Europe's experience translates...

The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the economics of the Great Depression. If there is anything approaching a consensus, it is a synthetic view which admits a role both for monetary policy mistakes and for the international monetary and financial system in transmitting those...

This paper documents the effects of exchange rates and the external constraint during the interwar years. In the absence of international policy coordination, exchange rate depreciation is shown to have been a necessary precondition for the adoption of policies promoting recovery from the Great...

Thia paper analyzes U.S. monetary-financial policy in the period leading up to the Treasury-Fed Accord. We model policy as an implicit target zone for the price level and an explicit zone for interest rates, and the difficulties on the eve of the Accord as an incipient run on a collapsing...

Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's dual mandate, which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate and other international variables matter only insofar as they influence inflation and the output...