This note lays out the basic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model of contagion, with a target audience of economists who want a framework for understanding the effects of social distancing and containment policies on the evolution of contagion and interactions with the...

It is generally very difficult to measure the effects of a currency depreciation on a country%u2019s balance sheet and financing costs given the endogenous properties of the exchange rate. History provides at least one natural experiment to test whether an exogenous exchange rate depreciation...

The first global financial bubble in stock prices occurred 1720 in Paris, London and the Netherlands. Explanations for these linked bubbles primarily focus on the irrationality of investor speculation and the corresponding stock price behavior of two large firms: the South Sea Company in Great...

We use a historical quasi-experiment to estimate the causal effect of trade on capital flows. We argue that fluctuations in regional rainfall within the Ottoman Empire capture the exogenous variation in exports from the Empire to Germany, France, and the U.K., during the period of 1859–1913....

This study compares labor and total factor productivity (TFP) in France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States in the very long (since 1890) and medium (since 1980) runs. During the past century, the United States has overtaken the United Kingdom and become the leading world economy....

In this paper, we define "The Chinese Saving Puzzle" as the persistently high national saving rate at 34-53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the past three decades and a surge in the saving rate by 11 percentage points from 2000-2008. Using data from the Flow of Funds Accounts (FFA)...

In this paper I quantify a gain that a country receives when its global influence is considered to be admirable by others. I use a standard gravity model of bilateral exports, a panel of data from 2006 through 2013, and an annual survey conducted for the BBC by GlobeScan which asks people in up...

We investigate empirically the extent to which government consumption substitutes for private consumption in nine East Asia countries. Panel cointegrating regression uncovers a significantly positive elasticity of substitution between government and private consumption, implying on average...

When a nation can finance its investments via foreign-currency denominated debt or domestic-currency claims, what is the optimal capital structure of the nation? Building on the functions of fiat money as both medium of exchange, and store of value like corporate equity, our model connects...

Almost $10 trillion is benchmarked to Morgan Stanley Capital International's Developed, Emerging, Frontier, and standalone market indexes. Reclassifications from one index to another require thousands of investors to decide how to react. We study a comprehensive sample of past reclassifications...