In this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months, "The Panic of 2008" as it has been called, to the demand for international reserves. In previous work, we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank's desire to backstop the broad money supply...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bondmarket from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the low credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914 gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

This paper examines sovereign lending to Latin America and the Caribbean from 1820 to 1913. We examine four waves of capital flows where defaults were followed by a return to market access. In spite of extended default, countries kept promising high returns that attracted international investors...

The PPP puzzle is based on empirical evidence that international price differences for individual goods (LOOP) or baskets of goods (PPP) appear highly persistent or even non-stationary. The present consensus is these price differences have a half-life that is of the order of five years at best,...

The long-run economic performance of Argentina since World War One has been relatively disappointing until recently. Yet, in the interwar period, signs of future retardation and" recurring crises were not so obvious. It is often claimed that an unmitigated success was the" remarkably rapid...

This paper analyzes the consequences of the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi for the global monetary system and its possible ascension to reserve currency status. In an unstable and financially integrated world, governments' precautionary demand for reserve assets is likely to...

Are financial crises a negative shock to demand or a negative shock to supply? This is a fundamental question for both macroeconomics researchers and those involved in real-time policymaking, and in both cases the question has become much more urgent in the aftermath of the recent financial...

The carry trade is the investment strategy of going long in high-yield target currencies and short in low-yield funding currencies. Recently, this naive trade has seen very high returns for long periods, followed by large crash losses after large depreciations of the target currencies. Based on...