This paper explores the causes and consequences of cross-country variation in mortgage market structure. It draws on insights from several fields: urban economics, asset pricing, behavioral finance, financial intermediation, and macroeconomics. It discusses lessons from the credit boom, the...

Over the period 1975 to 2005, the US dollar (particularly in relation to the Canadian dollar) and the euro and Swiss franc (particularly in the second half of the period) have moved against world equity markets. Thus these currencies should be attractive to risk-minimizing global equity...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and...

This paper presents new evidence on the persistence of fluctuations in real GNP. Two measures of persistence are estimated non-parametrically using post-war quarterly data from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom. and the United States. These estimates are compared with...