Once upon a time, in the 1990s, it was widely agreed that neither Europe nor the United States was an optimum currency area, although moderating this concern was the finding that it was possible to distinguish a regional core and periphery (Bayoumi and Eichengreen, 1993). Revisiting these...

We analyze the impact of technology on production and trade in services, focusing on the foreign exchange market. We identify exogenous technological changes by the connection of countries to submarine fiber-optic cables used for electronic trading, but which were not laid for purposes related...

Intro -- Contents -- 1. Introduction / Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden -- Part 1: Economic and Monetary Union -- 2. The Transition to Economic and Monetary Union / Geoffrey Garrett -- 3. The Political Economy of French Economic Policy in the Perspective of EMU / Christian de Boissieu and...

We consider the political economy of exchange rate choice and its implications for economic growth from an historical perspective. Previous studies have tended to find only a weak association between the choice of exchange rate regime on the one hand and growth and cohesion on the other. Our...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century absent the Great Depression, but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: World War II and the Cold War

Using panel data and case studies, we analyze the pre-1970 history of international capital flows and current account reversals. Considering a sample of emerging markets and advanced economies with per capita GDPs at least 60 per cent those of the lead country, we show that the incidence of...

Deflation has emerged as a new concern for Asian policy makers. The traditional view is that deflation can lead to a vicious cycle of falling demand and prices, and is thus a dangerous condition. However, another school of thought emphasizes the role of positive supply shocks and takes a more...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tends to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass contagiously from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyzes the contagious nature of...