During the 1990s there was considerable enthusiasm for currency boards, particularly for small open economies, until the collapse of the Argentine system in 2001-2 and the subsequent decline of the USD. Since then, currency boards have been used mainly by colonies and by Eastern European...

In spite of early skepticism on the merits of floating exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, 8 of the 25 largest countries in this group have now had a floating exchange rate regime for more than a decade. Using parsimonious VAR specifications covering the period of floating exchange rates,...

We study social learning by boundedly rational agents. Agents take a decision in sequence, after observing their predecessors and a private signal. They are unable to understand their predecessors’ decisions in their finest details: they only understand the relation between the aggregate...

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Much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well...

We examine the properties of simple quantity-based monetary policy rules of the kind widely used in low-income African economies. Using a DSGE model and focusing our attention on responses to positive aid shocks, we suggest that policy rules involving substantial reserve accumulation in the face...

Using a panel dataset covering a range of developed and developing countries, we show that common law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil law ones in the period 1995-2005. However, civilian systems were catching up, suggesting that civil law origin was not much of an...

It is often argued that financial globalization involves threshold effects - countries should have a minimum level of preconditions in place before they can reap the benets of financial integration. We investigate what this means for the dynamics of de facto financial globalization, using...

The timing and nature of industrialization in Britain and continental Europe had significant consequences for the growth and development of labour market institutions, effects which are still felt today and which are visible in the conceptual structure of labour law and company law in different...

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the...