Written on the 50th anniversary of floating exchange rates, this paper deals with possible alternatives to a unipolar dollar-based system. It considers (1) measures of international currency use; (2) potential challengers to the dollar; (3) network externalities; and (4) the plausibility of gold...

Vaccination rates have a statistically significant downward effect on the Covid-19 death rate across US counties, as of August 12, 2021. Controlling for poverty rates, age, and temperature lowers the magnitude of the estimate a little. Using the Biden-Trump vote in the 2020 election as an...

The existing literature on international macroeconomic policy coordination makes the unrealistic assumption that policy-makers all know the true model, from which it follows in general that the Nash bargaining solution is superior to the Nash non-cooperative solution. But everything changes once...

The finding of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that countriesf investment rates are highly correlated with their national saving rates has by now been confirmed by many subsequent studies, even though their inference that international capital mobility nust be low has not been as widely accepted....

Survey data on exchange rate expectations are used to divide the forward discount into expected depreciation and a risk premium. Our starting point is the common test oh whether the forward discount is an unbiased predictor of future changes in the spot rate. We use the surveys to decompose the...

Several recent developments have inspired us to consider a non-standard model of the dollar as a speculative bubble without the constraint of fully rational expectations: (1) the dollar continued to rise in 1984 after real interest rate differentials and other fundamentals began moving the wrong...

Survey data provide a measure of exchange rate expectations that is superior to the commonly-used forward exchange rate in the respect that it does notinclude a risk premium. We use survey data and the technique of bootstrapping to test a number of propositions of interest. We are able to reject...

The general price level does not provide a sensitive indicator of whether monetary policy is tight or loose, because mostprices are sticky. Interest rates are free to move, but they are an ambiguous indicator of monetary policy: one does not know whether changes in the interest rate are due to...