China's remarkable run of persistently high growth in recent decades is all the more stunning in light of the country's low levels of financial and institutional development, state-dominated economy, and nondemocratic government. Notwithstanding the inefficient and risky growth model, the...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface to the Paperback Edition -- Preface -- Part One. Setting the Stage -- Part Two. Building Blocks -- Part Three. Inadequate Institutions -- Part Four. Currency Competition -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Acknowledgments -- Index

"New technologies are shaking the foundations of traditional finance. Leading economist Eswar S. Prasad foresees the end of cash, as central banks develop their own digital currencies to compete with Bitcoin and Facebook's Diem. Money and finance are on the verge of dramatic transformations that...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups: industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between reservation wages of unemployed workers and macroeconomic factors – including aggregate and local unemployment rates, generosity of the unemployment compensation system and characteristics of the wage structure – as well...

This paper uses micro data from the New Earnings Survey to document that cross-sectional wage inequality in the U.K., which rose sharply in the 1980s and continued to rise moderately through the mid-1990s, has remained essentially unchanged in the latter half of the 1990s. As in the U.S.,...

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

In this paper, we develop an aggregation procedure using time-varying weights for constructing the common component of international economic fluctuations. The methodology for deriving time-varying weights is based on some stylized features of the data documented in the paper. The model allows...