This paper analyzes Krugman's contention that there is a "gold standard paradox" in the speculative attack literature. The paradox occurs if a country's currency appreciates after it runs out of gold or equivalently if a speculative attack can happen only after the country "naturally" runs out...

Two propositions are common in the international finance literature: (1) the real exchange rate is a random walk, (2) the real exchange rate time series properties essentially depend on the nominal exchange rate regime. The first proposition has been used in support of the claim that PPP cannot...

In this paper, we extend the bank run literature to an open economy model. We show that a foreign banking system, by raising deposit rates in the presence of a domestic banking panic, may generate sufficient liquid resources to acquire assets sold by the domestic banking system at bargain...

This paper investigates the consequences of fiscal policies for the exchange rate. After developing a simple theory of how government financing policies should effect the exchange rate, we test it using data on the dollar/pound exchange rate. Previous analyses have concentrated mainly on the...

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...

Financial frictions distort the allocation of resources among productive units--all else equal, firms whose financing choices are affected by such frictions face higher borrowing costs than firms with ready access to capital markets. As a result, input choices may differ systematically across...

Are firms' expectations systematically too optimistic or too pessimistic? Does it matter? We use micro data from the West German manufacturing subset of the IFO Business Climate Survey to infer quarterly production changes at the firm level and combine them with production expectations over a...

The question of whether morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death has been at the center of health debates in the United States for some time. Compression of morbidity would lead to longer life but less rapid medical spending increases than if life extension were...