French Abstract: Effets de réseau, biens homogènes et choix d’une devise internationale de facturation: nouveaux résultats pour un autre temps sur les marchés du pétrole. L’hypothèse selon laquelle les effets de réseau seraient particulièrement marqués dans les marchés de biens...

The IMF attempts to stabilize private capital flows to emerging markets by providing public monitoring and emergency finance. In analyzing its role we contrast cases where banks and bondholders do the lending. Banks have a natural advantage in monitoring and creditor coordination, while bonds...

This paper assesses the legacy of the Marshall Plan on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of General George Marshall's historic commencement address at Harvard University. I suggest that the circumstances today are very different from those which motivated Marshall's initiative in 1947

The paper offers some reflections on the convergence of productivity in the United States and Europe, which essentially stopped in the 1990s. It argues that the barriers preventing further convergence in the early 1990s were removed subsequently. But since then trends in productivity growth have...

Using international data starting 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points when their per capita incomes...

This paper considers the general equilibrium relationship between exchange rates and global imbalances. It emphasizes that the exchange rate is not a primitive but an equilibrium price determined by the policy mix. It uses extensions of the two-country Obstfeld-Rogoff model to analyze the...

U.S. balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s remain poorly understood. In this paper I argue that they had two aspects. On the one hand there was a problem of real overvaluation, evident in the erosion of the current account and reflecting the reluctance of the Fed, the Executive and Congress...

The argument of this paper is that growing capital mobility is unavoidable. Domestic financial liberalization and the revolution in information and communications technologies make it much more difficult to stop capital flows at the border. Effective controls will therefore have to become...

What will be political legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic? We find that epidemic exposure in what psychologists refer to as an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders. We find similar negative...

What will be political legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic? We find that epidemic exposure in an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders. We find similar negative effects on confidence in public...