This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the “Balassa-Samuelson” effect. But looking back fifty years, or more, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is...

This paper presents empirical evidence on asset market linkages between China and Asia and how these linkages have shifted during and after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. We find only weak cross-country linkages in longer-term interest rates, but much stronger linkages in equity...

Long half-lives of real exchange rates are often used as evidence against monetary sticky price models. In this study we show how exchange rate regimes alter the long-run dynamics and half-life of the real exchange rate, and we recast the classic defense of such models by Mussa (1986) from an...

This paper analyzes how the feasible mix of government expenditure and financing arrangements may change in a monetary union such as that presently under discussion for the European Community. The effect of this institutional change on the incentives facing fiscal policymakers in their budgetary...

Since the fiscal expansion and real appreciation of the dollar in the early 1980s, widespread attention has focused on the so-called "deindustrialization" and "two-tiered" development of the U.S. economy. This view argues that exchange rate appreciation caused a major resource shift away from...