Was foreign currency denominated debt a determinant of exchange rate and monetary policy during the Great Depression? Policy makers of the day thought so. High-frequency bond price data show depreciation was associated with elevated risk premia on public debt. We also show that foreign currency...

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect short and long run...

What drives globalization today and in the past? We employ a new micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods to address this question. These trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade....

What is the role of foreign currency debt in precipitating financial crises? In this paper we compare the 1880 to 1913 period to recent experience. We examine debt crises, currency crises, banking crises and the interrelation between these varieties of crises. We pay special attention to the...

The classical gold standard only gradually became an international monetary regime after 1870. This paper provides a cross-country analysis of why countries adopted when they did. I use duration analysis to show that network externalities operating through trade channels help explain the pattern...