This paper presents a selective survey of issues relevant to the choice of nominal anchors for monetary policy. Section I reviews long price-level histories for the United Kingdom and United States, which reveal that the price level behaved very differently following WWII in these countries than...

This paper examines five examples of rational expectations models with a continuum of convergent solutions and demonstrates serious difficulties in the economic interpretation of these solutions. The five examples are (1) a model of optimal capital accumulation with a negative rate of time...

The central theme of this paper is that international linkages between national economies influence, in fundamentally important ways, the effectiveness and proper conduct of national macroeconomic policies. Specifically, our purpose is to summarize the implications for the conduct of...

This paper examines five examples of rational expectations models with a continuum of convergent solutions and demonstrates serious difficulties in the economic interpretation of these solutions. The five examples are (1) a model of optimal capital accumulation with a negative rate of time...

This paper, written as a chapter for a Handbook of International Economics, reviews developments in the theory of international monetary economics from the late 1960's through the early 1980's. Following a review of the operation of the monetary mechanism of balance of payments adjustment in the...

U.S. balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s remain poorly understood. In this paper I argue that they had two aspects. On the one hand there was a problem of real overvaluation, evident in the erosion of the current account and reflecting the reluctance of the Fed, the Executive and Congress...

This paper is concerned with the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tends to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass contagiously from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature, and analyzes the contagious nature of...

In the UK's 2016 referendum on EU membership, young voters were more likely than their elders to vote Remain. Applying new methods to a half century of data, we show that this pattern reflects both ageing and cohort effects. Although voters become more Eurosceptical as they age, recent cohorts...

This paper, written primarily for historians, attempts to explain why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which we and others have documented...

In the aftermath of World War II, Italy and France experienced high inflation. The two countries enacted remarkably similar economic policy measures, but stabilization came at different times: for Italy at the end of 1947, for France a year later. Traditional explanations for the regained price...