We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

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...

Two general approaches have been offered for dealing with the developing country debt crisis: continued reliance on case-by-case negotiation, versus global plans for fundamentally restructuring the terms of international lending and repayment. Both approaches have precedents in earlier...

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...

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...