Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's geographic attributes - notably its distance from potential trading partners - as an instrument...

The origins of stagflation and the possibility of its recurrence continue to be an important concern among policymakers and in the popular press. It is common to associate the origins of the Great Stagflation of the 1970s with the two major oil price increases of 1973/74 and 1979/80. This paper...

A gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade. The panel data set used includes bilateral observations for five years spanning 1970 through 1990 for 186 countries. In this data set, there are over one hundred...

Aggregate shocks that move output and inflation in opposite directions create a tradeoff between output and inflation variability, forcing central bankers to make a choice. Differences in the degree of accommodation of shocks lead to disparate variability outcomes, revealing national central...

The influence of monetary policy over interest rates, and via interest rates over nonfinancial economic activity, stems from the central bank's role as a monopolist over the supply of bank reserves. Several trends already visible in the financial markets of many countries today threaten to...

This paper examines the international experiences with four basic types of monetary policy regimes: 1) exchange-rate targeting, 2) monetary targeting, 3) inflation targeting, and 4) monetary policy with an implicit but not an explicit nominal anchor. The basic theme that emerges from this...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Are Current Policies on Track to Eliminate Poverty? -- Chapter 3. How Mainstream Economics Works -- Chapter 4. Basic Principles to Understand Macroeconomics -- Chapter 5. Markets Alone Make No Development -- Chapter 6. Developing Countries in Global...

Introduction -- 1 What is money? -- A History of Money and Banking -- 2 Money from the very beginning -- 3 Banks enter the scene -- 4 The dawn of modern banking -- 5 The creation of a paper currency -- 6 Modern banking comes of age -- 7 The role of banks in a modern economy -- II An Analysis of...

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the...

Convergence to the Centre -- Financial Markets: Banks Capital Markets -- Firm Size, Productivity, EU-Funds and Corruption -- Labour Markets: Structural Characteristics and the Impact of Two Crises -- Transport and Mobility -- Monetary, Macroprudential, and Fiscal Policy -- Green Economy: Energy,...