US treasury secretary Mr. Paulson has proposed a bold plan to rescue the world financial system, which involves a taxpayer bailout of over $700 Billion. The Wall Street investment banks are disappearing and unbelievable changes occurring are somewhat similar to the great depression. This short...

The US economy is in the early stages of what looks to be the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. Starting with the downturn in the housing market and rising foreclosures, the crisis has spread to Fannie and Freddie, the government sponsored enterprises, and to...

Contracts for future delivery of commodities spread from Mesopotamia to Hellenistic Egypt and the Roman world. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, contracts for future delivery continued to be used in the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and they survived in canon law in western...

We quantify the time-varying effects of oil-price shocks on the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve policy, and global equity markets. While the first-round impact of oil-price shocks on U.S. economic growth has not changed materially over time, their formerly-negative second-round effects are notably...

This paper develops an open economy intertemporal optimising model that seeks to analyse the effect of bill financed government expenditure on several key financial markets. The main results suggest that an increase in bill financed government expenditure leads to a rise in net international...

We investigate the 30-year increase in the level and dispersion of house prices across U.S. metropolitan areas in a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium island model. The model is based on two main assumptions: households flow in and out of metropolitan areas in response to local wage shocks,...

The economic development of oil importing countries creates an increased demand for oil. This results in higher prices and an increased surplus to producers. A buyers' cartel would be a mechanism by which the US (in association with other importing countries) could retain (all or a part of) this...

In this paper, we quantify foreign aid's potential as an insurance mechanism against macroeconomic shocks. Within a dynamic model of aid flows between two endowment economies, we show that at least three fourths of the large welfare costs of macroeconomic fluctuations in poor countries could be...

This paper studies the effect of trade liberalization on inequality. We develop a theoretical framework that generates economy-wide distributions of wealth and income for different levels of trade protection. The model unambiguously determines the short-term and long-term effect of...

There are two schools of thought on causes of financial crises. One views such occurrences as homegrown, a consequence of structural weaknesses of the banking and corporate sector in the countries concerned. The other is of the view that financial crises are brought on by investors' panic...