Difficulties in contract enforcement impede international transactions in the world economy and domestic transactions in transition economies. In Contracts in Trade and Transition, Dalia Marin and Monika Schnitzer explain how barter as an economic institution can facilitate contract enforcement...

In Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods, Barry Eichengreen takes issue with the argument that today's international financial system is largely analogous to the Bretton Woods System of the period 1958 to 1973. Then, as now, it has been argued, the United States ran balance of...

Both state-space models and Markov switching models have been highly productive paths for empirical research in macroeconomics and finance. This book presents recent advances in econometric methods that make feasible the estimation of models that have both features. One approach, in the...

Currency boards, more so than other exchange rate regimes, have come in and out of fashion. Defined by a fixed exchange rate with full convertibility, central bank liabilities backed with foreign exchange reserves, and a high cost of exiting the regime, currency boards were common in colonial...

In the early 1980s, rational expectations and new classical economics dominated macroeconomic theory. This essay evolved from the authors' profound disagreement with that trend. It demonstrates not only how the new classical view got macroeconomics wrong, but also how to go about doing...

In the nineteenth century, skeptics wondered whether socialism could succeed at all. After the Bolshevik Revolution launched a first great experiment in building socialism, it was conceded that a socialist economy could indeed allocate the nation's resources with reasonable effectiveness and...

Recent analysis by political economists of monetary institution determinants in different countries has been limited by the fact that exchange rate regimes and central bank institutions are studied in isolation from each other, without examining how one institution affects the costs and benefits...

As economic advisor to the Bank of England for many years, C. A. E. Goodhart is uniquely positioned to assess the role of the central bank in the modern financial system. This book brings together twenty-one of his previously published articles dealing with the changing functions of central...

Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so during the last 100 years. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend...

The Tax Policy and the Economy series presents new research bearing on the economic effects of taxation on economic performance and analyzing the effects of potential tax reforms.