We assess the role of economic and security considerations in the currency composition of international reserves. We contrast the "Mercury hypothesis" that currency choice is governed by pecuniary factors familiar to the literature, such as economic size and credibility of major reserve currency...

The 1896 presidential election between William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley has gained new salience in the wake of the 2016 contest. We provide the first systematic analysis of voting patterns in 1896, combining county-level returns with economic, financial, demographic and climatological...

Once upon a time, in the 1990s, it was widely agreed that neither Europe nor the United States was an optimum currency area, although moderating this concern was the finding that it was possible to distinguish a regional core and periphery (Bayoumi and Eichengreen, 1993). Revisiting these...

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...

Intro -- Contents -- 1. Introduction / Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden -- Part 1: Economic and Monetary Union -- 2. The Transition to Economic and Monetary Union / Geoffrey Garrett -- 3. The Political Economy of French Economic Policy in the Perspective of EMU / Christian de Boissieu and...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Introduction -- PART I: APPRAISING EXCHANGE-RATE ARRANGEMENTS -- 1. The Endogeneity of Exchange-Rate Regimes -- 2. Exchange-Rate Behavior under Alternative Exchange-Rate Arrangements -- 3. Panel: One Money for How Many? -- PART II:...

Notwithstanding concerns that the dollar’s prospects as a reserve currency have been dimmed by the crisis, there has been no actual diminution of the dollar’s international role. The dollar will remain the principal form of international reserves for the foreseeable future.

Capital account liberalization, it is fair to say, remains one of the most controversial and least understood policies of our day. One reason is that different theoretical perspectives have very different implications for the desirability of liberalizing capital flows. Another is that empirical...

The experience of the 1990s renewed economists’ interest in the role of credit in macroeconomic fluctuations. The locus classicus of the credit-boom view of economic cycles is the expansion of the 1920s and the Great Depression. In this paper we ask how well quantitative measures of the credit...