We show the existence of a very short-term relationship at the daily frequency between changes in the price of a country's major commodity export and changes in its nominal exchange rate. The relationship appears to be robust and to hold when we use contemporaneous (realized) commodity price...

This evaluation of World Bank research between 1998 and 2005 was carried out by a panel consisting of Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Angus Deaton (Princeton, chair), Nora Lustig (UNDP), and Kenneth Rogoff (Harvard.) The panel selected a large random sample of research projects, which were read and...

Intro -- Contents -- Editorial -- Abstracts -- 1 Assessing Structural VARs -- 2 Volatility and Dispersion in Business Growth Rates: Publicly Traded versus Privately Held Firms -- 3 Do Taxes Explain European Employment? Indivisible Labor, Human Capital, Lotteries, and Savings -- 4 Fluctuating...

There is considerable controversy over why sluggish economic growth persists across many advanced economies six years after the onset of the financial crisis. Theories include a secular deficiency in aggregate demand, slowing innovation, adverse demographics, lingering policy uncertainty,...

This paper employs a dynamic bargaining-theoretic framework to analyze multilateral sovereign debt rescheduling negotiations. The analysis illustrates how various factors, such as the debtor`s gains from trade and the level of world interest rates, affect the relative bargaining power of various...

Using recent advances in the classification of exchange rate regimes, this paper finds no support for the popular bipolar view that countries will tend over time to move to the polar extremes of free float or rigid peg. Rather, intermediate regimes have shown remarkable durability. The analysis...

This paper examines annual commodity price data from England and Holland over a span of seven centuries. Our data incorporates transaction prices on seven commodities: barley, butter, cheese, oats, peas, silver, and wheat, as well as pound/shilling nominal exchange rates going back, in some...

This paper surveys early intellectual antecedents of the Krueger (2001) proposal for creating bankruptcy reorganization procedures at the international level. We focus on actual proposals for new procedures made from the late 1970s up to an influential lecture by Sachs (1995), with brief...

Are structural models getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons? Here we argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time...

There is a large and growing empirical literature that tests forthe existence of asset-price bubbles or quot;sunspotquot; equilibria -- equilibria unrelated to market fundamentals. Our view is that even tests for non-stationary asset-price bubbles should not be interpreted as such. In the...