Written on the 50th anniversary of floating exchange rates, this paper deals with possible alternatives to a unipolar dollar-based system. It considers (1) measures of international currency use; (2) potential challengers to the dollar; (3) network externalities; and (4) the plausibility of gold...

Vaccination rates have a statistically significant downward effect on the Covid-19 death rate across US counties, as of August 12, 2021. Controlling for poverty rates, age, and temperature lowers the magnitude of the estimate a little. Using the Biden-Trump vote in the 2020 election as an...

Holtham and Hughes Hallett, and a number of other authors, have suggested that a printout of all 1,000 cases of coordination considered in Frankel and Rockett (1988) should be made available. They wish to check whether, if coordination is restricted to policy packages that they call 'strong'...

We begin by examining determinants of aggregate foreign exchange reserve holdings by central banks (size of issuing country's economy and financial markets, ability of the currency to hold value, and inertia). But understanding the determination of reserve holdings probably requires going beyond...

This paper develops a new econometric framework to estimate and classify exchange rate regimes. They are classified into four distinct categories: fixed exchange rates, BBC (band, basket and crawl), managed floating, and freely floating. The procedure captures the patterns of exchange rate...

We estimate the size of the likely unofficial income of a household with a government official by the difference between the income that would be necessary to explain their observed home purchase behavior and the official income. Using unique and comprehensive administrative records on the House...

We study the implications of global supply chains for the design of monetary policy, using a small-open economy New Keynesian model with multiple stages of production. Within the family of simple monetary policy rules with commitment, a rule that targets separate producer price inflation at...

Most manufacturing activities use inputs from the financial and business services sectors. But these services sectors also compete for resources with manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about deindustrialization attributable to financial services in developed countries like the United...

A country may adopt policy measures such as raising its foreign exchange reserves to better prepare for foreign interest rate shocks or sudden reversal of international capital flows, which in principle should reduce financial vulnerability for its firms and the entire economy, but the...

The United States imports intermediate inputs from China, helping downstream US firms to expand employment. Using a cross-regional reduced-form specification but differing from the existing literature, this paper (a) incorporates a supply chain perspective, (b) uses intermediate input imports...