Argentina's economic crisis has strong similarities with previous crises stretching back to the nineteenth century. A common thread runs through all these crises: the interaction of a weak, undisciplined, or corruptible banking sector, and some other group of conspirators from the public or...

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade...

This paper surveys the evolution of international capital mobility since the late nineteenth century. We begin with an overview of empirical evidence on the fall and rise of integration in the global capital market. A discussion of institutional developments focuses on the use of capital...

Great attention is now being paid to global imbalances, the growing U.S. current account deficit financed by growing surpluses in the rest of the world. How can the issue be understood in a more historical perspective? We seek a meaningful comparison between the two eras of globalization:...

Do international trade and finance flow together? In theory, trade and finance can be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. Trade and...

The rapid growth of international reserves---a development concentrated in the emerging markets---remains a puzzle. In this paper we suggest that a model based on financial stability and financial openness goes far toward explaining reserve holdings in the modern era of globalized capital...

The interwar period was marked by the end of the classical gold standard regime and new levels of macroeconomic disorder in the world economy. The interwar disorder often is linked to policies inconsistent with the constraint of the open-economy trilemma the inability of policymakers...

In this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months, quot;The Panic of 2008quot; as it has been called, to the demand for international reserves. In previous work, we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank's desire to backstop the broad money...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution, but is skill-biased today. This is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model which can endogenously account for these facts, where factor bias reflects profit-maximizing decisions by...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries? growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If quot;getting policies rightquot; is wrong or...