This paper examines the macroeconomic aftermath of the 1992 breakdown of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The economic performance of six leaver' nations is compared with five stayer' nations that maintained a roughly fixed parity with the Deutsche Mark. Recent writing about...

We study private equity in a dynamic general equilibrium model and ask two questions: (i) Why does the investment of venture funds respond more strongly to the business cycle than that of buyout funds? (ii) Why are venture funds returns higher than those of buyout? On (i), venture brings in new...

We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

We examine econometrically the real effects of paper money's introduction into colonial New England over the 1703-1749 period. Departing from earlier analyses that focus primarily on the depreciation of paper money in the region, we show that expansion of the money stock promoted growth in...

Recent cross-country investigations of the role of institutional fundamentals such as the protection of property rights in promoting financial development have extended a literature that has for decades maintained that financial factors can affect real outcomes. In this paper we pursue this new...

Starting from the same level of productivity and per-capita income as the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Europe fell behind steadily to a level of barely half in 1950, and then began a rapid catch-up. While Europe's level of productivity has almost converged, its income per person...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...