For those who monitor relative wealth accumulation and are unmoved by divine empathy, a disincentive to increase the rate of full manumission is possible. Consider slavery as overt, formal constraints to zero or even negative wealth accumulation; and consider freedom of ex-slaves as the...

Under Alexander the Great the Greeks conquered Asia. This extraordinary undertaking was made possible, beside the military achievement, by the Greek thought and philosophy. The belief in the superiority of the Greek over the barbarian and freedom of the first and slavery of the second rendered...

This paper presents a flexible-price small open economy model with a peso problem in productivity states. Agents rationally adjust their beliefs about future productivity growth after the arrival of news. A downward revision of expectations triggers a Sudden Stop, together with large declines in...

The paper reviews exchange rate options for Mercosur countries. We start from the observation that most of the countries in the region have a longstanding tendency to adopt fixed exchange rates, and ask how such a system could best be designed. The Argentine crisis has demonstrated that...

Most proposals for Asian monetary cooperation assign a special role to the Japanese yen as an anchor currency. We focus instead on the potential role of the Chinese renminbi. It becomes increasingly clear that China will assume the role of the dominant economy in the region, and that it will...

Foreign direct investment is of increasing importance in the European Union. This paper estimates the effect of taxes on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows and on three sub-components of these flows for the countries of the en- larged European Union. The model in the spirit of gravity...

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high-frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean...

This paper investigates contagion effects. In a model with highly and lowly informed investors we show that a currency crisis in one country can trigger a crisis in another country. Portfolio losses of the highly informed investors in one country will force them to withdraw capital from the...

This paper investigates contagion effects. In a model with highly and lowly informed investors we show that a currency crisis in one country can trigger a crisis in another country. Portfolio losses of the highly informed investors in one country will force them to withdraw capital from the...

This paper examines how cross-border differences in the stringency of bank regulations affect U.S. banks' international activities. The analysis relies on a unique bank-level dataset on the globally most active U.S. banks' balance sheet as well as their cross-border, foreign affiliate lending...