In recent years, a number of central banks have announced numerical inflation targets as the basis for their monetary strategies. After outlining the reasons why such strategies might be adopted in the pursuit of price stability, this study examines the adoption, operational design, and...

Interventions by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 were generally viewed as unprecedented and in violation of the rules--notably Bagehot's rule--that a central bank should follow to avoid the time-inconsistency problem and moral hazard. Reviewing the evidence for...

Research on the quantitative impact of interwar protection on trade flows remains scarce, and much of it has concluded that the impact was surprisingly small. In this paper we ask: Did Indian interwar protection hurt UK manufacturers, by raising tariffs on manufactured imports? Or did it favour...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution, but is skill-biased today. This is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model which can endogenously account for these facts, where factor bias reflects profit-maximizing decisions by...

Using a simple case study approach. this paper compares the conduct and performance of monetary policy in six Industrialized countries since the breakup of the Bretton Woods system. Our purpose is to develop fruitful hypotheses that might usefully be explored in subsequent, more formal research....

A recent literature explores the nature and causes of the collapse in international trade during 2008 and 2009. The decline was particularly great for automobiles and industrial supplies; it occurred largely along the intensive margin; quantities fell by more than prices; and prices fell less...

International trade became much less multilateral during the 1930s. Previous studies, looking at aggregate trade flows, have argued that discriminatory trade policies had comparatively little to do with this. Using highly disaggregated information on the UK's imports and trade policies, we find...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates. We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the world,...