The paper reviews the Argentine debt experience in the past ten years. The emphasis is on the interaction between relative prices, financial instability, budget .deficits, inflation and debt accumulation. A longer run perspective shows that the continuing fiscal problems have stood in the way of...

This paper examines the operation of the gold standard and the performance of the Bank of England during the crisis of 1847. The key feature of that crisis has been its origin: it originated from a massive real shock rather than from monetary disorder. A harvest failure gave rise to commercial...

Macroeconomic populism is an approach to economics that emphasizes growth and income distribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance, external constraints and the reaction of economic agents to aggressive non-market policies. The purpose of our paper is to show that...

This paper analyzes the behavior of the current account and the exchange rate in the British economy during the 1970's, and discusses the outlook, as influenced by the availability of oil revenues, for exchange rate developments during the 1980's.Both trade and exchange rate behavior are...

The paper was prepared for the NBER-IMF conference on Exchange Rate Policy and Interdependence. It reviews the experience with flexible exchange rates and the main policy alternatives that have been suggested. The theoretical part develops a modern open economy macro model with an emphasis on...

The paper develops an analytical framework to discuss the determinants of the premium in the black market for dollars in Brazil. While the specific details of the model were chosen with the Brazilian case in mind, the structure of the model is quite general and suitable for application to black...

This report presents two unrelated, short papers on exchange rate rules and on the real value of the external debt. The paper on exchange rate policy uses the Taylor model of overlapping, long term wage contracts to ask whether accommodating or PPP oriented exchange rate policies tend to...

The essay is an extended version of the Frank D. Graham Lecture presented at Princeton University in May 1985. It discusses the interaction of inflation and exchange rate policy in a variety of contexts. Four different settings are used to highlight that role: the experiments with exchange rate...

Inflation persists at moderate rates of 15-30 percent in all the countries that successfully reduced triple digit inflations in the 1980s. Several other countries, for example Colombia, have experienced moderate inflation for prolonged periods. In this paper we first set out theories of...