This paper reviews the literature on gender and culture. Gender gaps in various outcomes (competitiveness, labor force participation, and performance in mathematics, amongst many others) show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time. The economics literature...

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children...

This paper presents a tractable model of a global economy in which countries can use a broad range of policy instruments---the nominal interest rate, taxes on imports and exports, taxes on capital flows or foreign exchange interventions. Low demand may lead to unemployment because of downward...

This paper attempts to assess whether money can generate persistent economic" fluctuations in dynamic general equilibrium models of the business cycle. We show that a small" nominal friction in the goods market can make the response of output to monetary shocks large" and persistent if it is...

This paper analyzes the case for the international coordination of macroprudential policies in the context of a simple theoretical framework. Both domestic macroprudential policies and prudential capital controls have international spillovers through their impact on capital flows. The...

This paper presents a simple model of how a small open economy can undervalue its real exchange rate using its capital account policies. The paper presents several properties of such policies, and proposes a rule of thumb to assess their welfare cost. The model is applied to an analysis of...

Has the US dollar delivered the benefits that the rest of the world is expecting from its holdings of international liquidity? US government debt has been liquid and safe, and it is supplied in sufficient quantity. But it has given a low return to the countries that accumulated the most...

We develop a model of leverage that is amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. We compare two identical economies: in one economy, agents cannot borrow; in the other, they can leverage a risky asset to issue debt. Leverage increases asset prices in the laboratory....

We study default and endogenous leverage in the laboratory. To this purpose, we develop a general equilibrium model of collateralized borrowing amenable to laboratory implementation and gather experimental data. In the model, leverage is endogenous: agents choose how much to borrow using a risky...

We study the pattern of volatility of gross issuance in international capital markets since 1980. We find several short-lived episodes of high volatility. Over the long run, however, volatility has declined, suggesting that international financial integration has not made financial markets more...