Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

Commodity prices are back. This paper looks at connections between monetary policy, and agricultural and mineral commodities. We begin with the monetary influences on commodity prices, first for a large country such as the United States, then smaller countries. The claim is that low real...

To update a famous old statistic: a political leader in a developing country is almost twice as likely to lose office in the 6 months following a currency crash as otherwise. This difference, which is highly significant statistically, holds regardless whether the devaluation takes place in the...

Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded. A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a race to the bottom' effect. If...

The paper reviews recent trends in thinking on exchange rate regimes. It begins by classifying countries into regimes, noting the distinction between de facto and de jure regimes, but also noting the low correlation among proposed ways of classifying the latter. The advantages of fixed exchange...

Globalization of trade and finance has gone a long way over the last half-century. But it is less impressive than most non-economists think, judged either by the standard of 100 years ago or by the hypothetical standard of perfect international integration. The paper documents the extent of...

Figures for 1995 estimate trading by dealers in the foreign exchange market at over $1,200 billion per day, most of it with other dealers. Some have linked this volume to concerns of excessive volatility in the market. Tobin's proposal to address this volatility with a small tax on all foreign...

This introduction to a forthcoming NBER volume on 'The Internationalization of Equity Markets' argues that the existing finance literature has in some respects not kept pace with world trends. Most empirical studies fail to take due account of the diversity of assets offered by countries around...

This paper reaches seven conclusions regarding the Yen Bloc that Japan is reputed to be forming in Pacific Asia. (1) Gravity-model estimates of bilateral trade show that the level of trade in East Asia is biased intra-regionally, as it is within the European Community and within the Western...

This paper, written for an NBER conference on "American Economic Policy in the 1980s," discusses the dollar from the standpoint, not of what moved the exchange rate or what policies might have been better, but rather of why the political system adopted the policies that it did. The first half is...