In his seminal 1960 article Robert Mundell proposed a model of balance-of-payments crises in which confidence in the continuation of a currency peg depended on the observed holdings of central bank foreign reserves. We examine the implications of a reformulation of this view from the perspective...

Currency depreciation in the 1930s is almost universally dismissed or condemned. It is credited with providing little if any stimulus for economic recovery in the depreciating countries and blamed for transmitting harmful beggar-thy-neighbor impulses to the rest of the world econonv. In this...

This paper investigates empirically the differences in time?series behavior of key economic aggregates under alternative exchange rate systems. We use a postwar sample of 49 countries to compare the behavior of output. consumption, trade flows, government consumption spending, and real exchange...

Traditional methods of collecting data from businesses and households face increasing challenges. These include declining response rates to surveys, increasing costs to traditional modes of data collection, and the difficulty of keeping pace with rapid changes in the economy. The digitization of...

During the early years of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set on all aspects of the pre-WWII macroeconomy. Until 1978, this data set existed only on the handwritten sheets to which the early NBER researchers copied the data from original...

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Effective with version 8, the Penn World Table (PWT) will be taken over by the University of California, Davis and the University of Groningen, with continued input from Alan Heston at the University of...

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries by conducting large-scale incentivized online...