Every once in a great while, history provides us with a natural experiment, an episode in which a major change in a key economic variable occurs that has no direct relation to the contemporaneous behavior of the variables that theory suggests it ought to effect.A classic example was the currency...

This paper examines data for stock prices and price levels of 14 developed countries during the post-WWII era and compares their behavior in that sample with behavior over the past two centuries in the UK and the US. Contrary to much of the literature of the past several decades, we find that...

In this paper we examine the stability of the real exchange rate and the macroeconomic effects of alternative exchange rate regimes, including currency union, on real exchange rate behaviour. We focus on the Irish punt in order to exploit its diversity of experience over different nominal...

In this paper we study the behavior of the real exchange rate of three American currencies relative to the U.S. dollar: the Canadian dollar, the Mexican peso and the Panamanian balboa. Our principal objective in doing so is to investigate the effects of alternative exchange-rate regimes,...

The objective of this study is to examine whether and to what extent Australian banks use loan loss provisions (LLPs) for capital management, earnings management and signalling. We examine if there were changes in the use of LLPs due to the implementation of banking regulations consistent with...

During the late-1940s and the early-1950s Milton Friedman favored a rule under which fiscal policy would be used to generate changes in the money supply with the aim of stabilizing output at full employment. He believed that the economy is inherently unstable because of endogenous movements in...

This paper examines exchange-rate and price-level data for the long period 1590-2009 for the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (earlier the Dutch Republic and England), countries that at various times over this near four century span have differed substantially in terms of the pace at which...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation into timing relationships between variables within and across industrialized countries. In the analysis we highlight the two polar cases of completely closed and open economies and draw some implications for timing between monetary...