European monetary history prior to 1950 presents many attempts at international monetary coordination, but none were as bold and as far reaching as the European Monetary Union envisioned in the Delors Report of 1989 and enacted through the 1991 Treaty on the European Union in Maastricht. This...

Literature has long argued that the nation is a community, either “imagined”, ”invented”, or of “sentiment”. The existence of such a “national community” has strongly relied upon the assumption that members share –or feel/believe that they share-- something/s in common. It...

In this article, I attempt to highlight the relationships between football (soccer), politics, culture, and social change in Latin American societies. The essential argument of the paper is that football in Latin America has tended to reinforce nationalistic, authoritarian, class-based, and...

This article compares today's euro-zone debt crisis, in terms of economic diplomacy, with the earlier crisis in Latin America. Four features served to reconcile the tensions and resolve the 1980s' crisis. A balance was preserved between debtor countries and creditor banks. Though initially...

The key elements of effective central banking that account for much of the improvement in monetary policy around the world today are outlined and explained. The past quarter of the century has been a revolutionary period in which the world emerged from great inflation and output instability into...

This paper presents a new view on the gold price of greenbacks during and after the American Civil War by analyzing exchange-rate volatility rather than exchange-rate levels. Our empirical investigation detects regimes of high and low volatility alternating in a way that is consistent with a...

Using a Markov-switching GARCH model this paper analyzes the volatility evolution of the greenback's price in gold from after the Civil War until the return to gold convertibility in 1879. The econometric inference associated with our methodology indicates a switch to a regime of low volatility...

This paper examines the impact of ADR activity on liquidity of four major Latin American stock markets. We construct a measure of ADR activity in U.S. markets for a sample of ADRs trading during January 2003–December 2010, which is subsequent to the financial liberalization episodes and...