Latin America’s economic performance is mediocre at best, despite abundant natural resources and flourishing neighbors to the north. The perplexing question of how some of the wealthiest nations in the world in the nineteenth century are now the most crisis-prone has long puzzled economists...

The world’s leading economies, both developed and developing, are engaged in an ever changing economic symbiosis that is governed in large part by demographics and technological change, but also by pension, healthcare, and other fiscal policies. This interconnected economic evolution - what...

We study linkages between financial development, international trade, and long-run growth using data since 1880 for seventeen now-developed "Atlantic" economies and a set of cross-country and dynamic panel data models. We find that finance and trade reinforced each other before 1930, but that...

Do steep recoveries follow deep recessions? Does it matter if a credit crunch or banking panic accompanies the recession? Moreover does it matter if the recession is associated with a housing bust? We look at the American historical experience in an attempt to answer these questions. The answers...

Do steep recoveries follow deep recessions? Does it matter if a credit crunch or banking panic accompanies the recession? Moreover, does it matter if the recession is associated with a housing bust? We look at the American historical experience in an attempt to answer these questions. The...

We identify the timing of currency, banking crises and sudden stops in New Zealand from 1880 to 2008, and consider the extent to which empirical models can explain New Zealand's crisis history. We find that the cross country evidence on the determinants of crises fits New Zealand experience...

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...

Monetary policy regimes encompass the constraints or limits imposed by custom, institutions and nature on the ability of the monetary authorities to influence the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates. This paper surveys the historical experience of both international and domestic (national)...