Greater transparency in central bank operations is the most dramatic change in the conduct of monetary policy in recent years. In this paper we present new information on its extent and effects. We show that the trend is general: a large number of central banks have moved in the direction of...

The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the economics of the Great Depression. If there is anything approaching a consensus, it is a synthetic view which admits a role both for monetary policy mistakes and for the international monetary and financial system in transmitting those...

I provide a structured comparison of the nineteenth-century classical gold standard and the Euro, basing my analysis heavily on recent research. Both similarities and differences are evident in the historical record. Both regimes were vaunted as engines of convergence, but in both cases...