This note attempts a concise yet comprehensive overview of the crisis still facing the eurozone, in the areas of competitiveness, fiscal policy, and banking. The euro's founding documents enshrined such principles as fiscal constraints, the "no bailout clause," and assignment to the ECB of the...

American politicians often take it for granted that national security would be enhanced by accelerating domestic oil production, through policies such as subsidies, tax advantages, opening up federal lands for drilling at artificially low charges, and relaxing environmental regulation. This note...

The paper offers a new approach to estimate de facto exchange rate regimes, a synthesis of two techniques. One is a technique that the authors have used in the past to estimate implicit de facto weights when the hypothesis is a basket peg with little flexibility. The second is a technique used...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

The paper updates the answer to the question: what precisely is the exchange rate regime that China has put into place since 2005, when it announced a move away from the dollar peg? Is it a basket anchor with the possibility of cumulatable daily appreciations, as was announced at the time? We...

An advantage of monetary union is facilitating trade. After many critiques, Rose's basic finding is left standing: currency unions have greater trade effects than previously believed. Updated estimates also find an effect of the euro on trade among members that is significant (though...

Two theoretical propositions have played important roles in the thinking of U.S. presidents enacting large tax cuts since 1981. The first, often known as the Laffer Hypothesis, claims that reductions in marginal tax rates stimulate economic activity so much as to raise overall tax revenue. The...

This paper is an econometric investigation of the determinants of the real value of the South African rand over the period 1984-2006. The results show a relatively good fit. As always with exchange rate equations, there is substantial weight on the lagged exchange rate, which can be attributed...

They say 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' Perhaps, then, there are also no libertarians in crises. Even those in favor of sharply reducing the role of the government usually agree that, for example, there is a valid Lender of Last Resort role for the central bank in the event of banking...