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,...

In this paper we describe some of the opportunities and perils for international monetary cooperation associated with EMU. Our approach brings together two strands in the literature; one concerned with institutions, the other focusing on policy consensus. Our analysis raises questions about the...

The experience of the 1990s renewed economists' interest in the role of credit in macroeconomic fluctuations. The locus classicus of the credit-boom view of economic cycles is the expansion of the 1920s and the Great Depression. In this paper we ask how well quantitative measures of the credit...

We analyse the institutional determinants of economic performance, taking European labour-market institutions as a case in point. European economic growth after the Second World War was based on Fordist technologies, a setting to which the continent's institutions of solidaristic wage bargaining...

The growing weight of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the world economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP) and trade volume, has intensified debate on the potential international role of its currency—the renminbi (RMB). This paper provides an overview of RMB...