Can developing countries enhance credibility with international markets by adopting a hard currency peg? In this paper we review the hypothesis that adherence to the gold standard facilitated the access of peripheral countries to European capital markets in the first era of financial...

This paper asks whether developing countries can reap credibility gains from submitting policy to a strict monetary rule. Following earlier work, we look at the gold standard era (1880-1914) as a "natural experiment" to test whether adoption of a rule-based monetary framework such as the gold...

For the better part of the past decade, the world economy has been dominated by a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with US over-consumption. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 likely marks the beginning of the end of the Chimerican relationship. In this paper we...

Would the movement of capital from to poor countries greatly increase, if the commitment to protecting property and allowing capital to move freely were more credible? This paper asks whether the British Empire provided global public goods that supported large-scale development finance before...

Over the past five years the world has witnessed a spectacular boom in asset prices. This paper reviews different explanations for this phenomenon, and argues that future financial historians will point to the divergence between high returns on capital and the low cost of capital, not to excess...

We ask whether developing countries reap credibility gains from submitting policy to a strict monetary rule. We look at the gold standard era, 1880-1914, to test whether adoption of a rule-based monetary framework such as the gold standard increased policy credibility, focusing on sixty...

This article offers a comparative analysis of the inflationary experiences of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, applying theories about money and government budget constraints in the manner of Thomas Sargent and Fran ois Velde. The comparison looks beyond economic policy itself to the...

There is, in theory, a plausible role for the European Union as the partner of a militarily assertive United States: the peacekeeper that follows in the wake of the peacemaker. The war in Iraq, however, has raised the possibility of a diametrically different role for Europe: as a potential...