In this paper we develop a procedure for applying the core implications of the theory of optimum currency areas to cross-country data. We demonstrate that these implications find strong empirical support. The relationship between the characteristics of countries to which OCA theory points and...

Conventional wisdom has it that the Mexican crisis of 1994-95 was "the first financial crisis of the 21st century." In this paper I argue that it may be better understood as the last financial crisis of the 19th. The crisis in Mexico exhibits striking similarities to the Baring Crisis of 1890,...

The connection between monetary integration and political integration is probably the most contentious aspect of the Maastricht process. In this paper I suggest that relationship between monetary and political integration is contingent; under only slightly different initial conditions, these two...

This is a model of quality ladder of machines in an endogenous growth context, when some machines are scrapped while others coexist with the latest variety, with the economic life of machines endogenously determined as in old vintage-capital models. Policies that affect this economic life of...

This conference is one sign of increased interest in collective or cooperative exchange rate arrangements for East Asian countries. A more concrete indication is the announcement in November 1995 by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the central banks of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand of...

To analyze the effect of asset inequality on cooperation within a group, we consider a two-player noncooperative model of conservation of a common-pool resource (CPR): a fishery. We give necessary and sufficient conditions such that conservation is a Nash equilibrium, and we show that increasing...

Eichengreen argues that recent developments in financial theory provide rigorous microeconomic foundations for the fragile, volatile and crisis-prone forms of market behavior identified in Charles Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes and invoked in The World in Depression as an...

This talk was presented at the Finlay-O'Brien Lecture, delivered at University College, Dublin, October 7, 1996. One of the themes is that the economics profession knows little about EMU's benefits and costs. But while EMU is a gamble, it is probably a gamble worth taking, if you believe, as I...