Teacher quality is crucial to deliver good education. However, improving teacher quality in developing countries can be a tough problem. This paper investigates the impact of a teacher placement program that sends college graduates with a strong academic track record to teach in rural primary...

When analysing any social phenomenon, encounters among different social science disciplines and fields of investigation dispersed over time and space may well produce illusory rapprochements. Such encounters nevertheless have great potential for producing truly common knowledge. In matters of...

Compared with the period 1920-1990, the current monetary policy implementation techniques are relatively well-focused and transparent. In particular, (i) they mostly aim at achieving a well defined operational target (typically the overnight interest rate), (ii) monetary policy operations are...

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university's first hundred years, 1892-1992. Many people associate Chicago's views with Milton Friedman's advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was...

The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

We examine the sources of macroeconomic economic fluctuations by estimating a variety of medium-scale DSGE models within a unified framework that incorporates regime switching both in shock variances and in the inflation target. Our general framework includes a number of different model features...