Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

Charitable donations by private individuals and firms can help fund the Millennium Development Goals. What are the prospects for increasing donations for international development, whether from small-scale donors, the super-rich (as in the recent gifts by Bill Gates and Ted Turner), or the...

The recent financial crisis teaches important lessons regarding the lender-of-last resort function. Large swap lines extended in 2007-08 from the Federal Reserve to other central banks show that the classic concept of a national last-resort lender fails to address key vulnerabilities in a...

We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long term capital flows, global imbalances and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in...

Has the US dollar delivered the benefits that the rest of the world is expecting from its holdings of international liquidity? US government debt has been liquid and safe, and it is supplied in sufficient quantity. But it has given a low return to the countries that accumulated the most...

This paper examines three interwar exchange rate regimes: the free float of the early 1920s, the fixed rates of 1927-31 and the managed float of the early 1930s. Nominal rates were considerably more variable under free than under managed floating. The reduction in nominal exchange rate...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century absent the Great Depression, but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: World War II and the Cold War. We argue that without the...

This paper examines the international monetary system between the Wars. It confirms the generality of several widely held interpretations of recent experience with floating exchange rates. There is a positive association between nominal exchange rate flexibility and nominal exchange rate...

This paper is an exploration of the theory of endogenous regime changes which takes as an illustration the making of the classical gold standard. The international gold-based fixed exchange rate regime that surfaced during the 1870s has traditionally been interpreted as resulting from a mix of...

This paper provides a new methodology to map international monetary relations in the 19th century. We identify an index of international liquidity and, applying techniques borrowed from formal network analysis (in particular, blockmodelling) we produce a formal ranking of currencies according to...