Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or...

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of...

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any...

Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

A pre-specified set of nine prominent U.S. equity return anomalies produce significant alphas in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. All of the anomalies are consistently significant across these five countries, whose developed stock markets afford the most extensive data. The anomalies...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: Are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

Although the empirical growth literature has yielded many findings on postwar convergence patterns, it has had little to say about the determinants of convergence in earlier epochs. This paper investigates convergence for group of seven countries during the period 1870-1914, the last great phase...

How real interest rates behave over time is critical to our understanding of many macroeconomic issues, and much recent research has pursued this question. Very little of the research, however, has focused on real interest rates outside the United States. This paper is an empirical exploration...

The paper explores the implications of high debt for monetary policy. In Europe, debt (and deficits) play a special role at present in the run up to Maastricht because large debts are seen as a threat to the integrity of the new European money. The paper reviews two historical episodes-- the...