This paper revises pre-World War II current account data for thirteen countries by treating gold flows on a consistent basis. The standard historical data sources often fail to distinguish between monetary gold exports, which are capital-account credits, and nonmonetary gold exports, which are...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of "commodity points" -- thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possib ly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the...

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

This paper assesses the legacy of the Marshall Plan on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of General George Marshall's historic commencement address at Harvard University. I suggest that the circumstances today are very different from those which motivated Marshall's initiative in 1947. After...

In this paper I consider the connections between the exchange rate and the financial system, focusing on the implications of international monetary arrangements for the stability of the banking system. I ask questions like the following. Under what conditions can a currency peg jeopardize the...

This paper examines the extent to which speculation against the French franc in 1992-93 was motivated by the fundamentals or resulted from a sunspot phenomenon. We develop a model of currency crises which encompasses both hypotheses about the origin of speculation. The estimation shows that the...

In this paper we describe some of the opportunities and perils for international monetary cooperation associated with EMU. Our approach brings together two strands in the literature; one concerned with institutions, the other focusing on policy consensus. Our analysis raises questions about the...

Closed-end country funds trade in New York at their price. Their Net Asset Value (NAV) represent the value of the underlying assets, usually traded in each particular country. If the holders of the underlying assets have more information the about loc al assets than the country fund holders,...