Browse

Following an unprecedented economic boom fed by foreign investment, the Russian Revolution triggered the worst sovereign default in history. This book tells the dramatic story of this boom and bust, chronicling the forgotten experiences of leading financiers of the age. Shedding critical new light on the decision making of the powerful personalities who acted as the gatekeepers of international finance, the book explains how they channeled foreign capital into Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While economists have long relied on quantitative analysis to grapple with questions relating to the drivers of cross-border capital flows, this book adopts an historical approach, drawing on banking and government archives in four countries. It provides rare insights into the thinking of influential figures in world finance as they sought to navigate one of the most challenging and lucrative markets of the first modern age of globalization. The book reveals how a complex web of factors—from government interventions to competitive dynamics and cultural influences—drove a large inflow of capital during this tumultuous period in world history. The book demonstrates how the realms of finance and politics—of bankers and Bolsheviks—grew increasingly intertwined, and how investing in Russia became a political act with unforeseen repercussions.

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have become one of the workhorses of modern macroeconomics and are extensively used for academic research as well as forecasting and policy analysis at central banks. This book introduces readers to state-of-the-art computational techniques used in the Bayesian analysis of DSGE models. The book covers Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques for linearized DSGE models, novel sequential Monte Carlo methods that can be used for parameter inference, and the estimation of nonlinear DSGE models based on particle filter approximations of the likelihood function. The theoretical foundations of the algorithms are discussed in depth, and detailed empirical applications and numerical illustrations are provided. The book also gives invaluable advice on how to tailor these algorithms to specific applications and assess the accuracy and reliability of the computations. The book is essential reading for graduate students, academic researchers, and practitioners at policy institutions.

Countries that ignite a process of rapid economic growth almost always do so while lacking what experts say are the essential preconditions for development, such as good infrastructure and institutions. This book uses this paradox to explain what is wrong with mainstream development thinking—and to offer a practical blueprint for moving poor countries out of the low-income trap regardless of their circumstances. The book begins with an observation of the increasingly globalized world economy in which technological development allows the use of factors of production in locations that maximize returns and utility, and countries gain mutually by trading with each other if their strategies focus on comparative advantage. The prospects for sustained and inclusive growth are even greater for low-income economies that enjoy the benefits of backwardness. The book advocates implementing viable strategies to capture new opportunities for industrialization, which can enable low-income economies to set forth on a dynamic path of structural change and lead to poverty reduction and prosperity. It concludes with an evaluation of lessons from development thinking and experience and identifies the main reasons why past intellectual and policy frameworks failed to yield the expected results. It then offers a pragmatic blueprint for allowing low-income countries to ignite and sustain economic growth without preconditions.

A wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology, political science, law, and other fields. Research has also shown that economics can provide insight into many aspects of sports, including soccer. This book uses soccer to test economic theories and document novel human behavior, thus illuminating economics through the world's most popular sport. The book offers unique and often startling insights into game theory and microeconomics, covering topics such as mixed strategies, discrimination, incentives, and human preferences. It also looks at finance, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. The book provides rich data sets and environments that shed light on universal economic principles in interesting and useful ways. It is essential reading for students, researchers, and sports enthusiasts as it shows what soccer can do for economics.

The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. This book locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm's employment. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, the book demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and it sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade in Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees worked both for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company's flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance. The book highlights the dynamic potential of social networks in the early modern era.

Brazil is the world's sixth-largest economy, and for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. While the country underwent two decades of unrelenting decline from 1975 to 1994, the economy has rebounded dramatically. How did this nation become an emerging power? This book looks at the factors behind why this particular country has successfully progressed up the economic development ladder. The book examines the roles of beliefs, leadership, and institutions in the elusive, critical transition to sustainable development. Analyzing the last fifty years of Brazil's history, the book explains how the nation's beliefs, centered on social inclusion yet bound by orthodox economic policies, led to institutions that altered economic, political, and social outcomes. Brazil's growth and inflation became less variable, the rule of law strengthened, politics became more open and competitive, and poverty and inequality declined. While these changes have led to a remarkable economic transformation, there have also been economic distortions and inefficiencies that the book argues are part of the development process. This book demonstrates how a dynamic nation seized windows of opportunity to become a more equal, prosperous, and rules-based society.

This book develops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban competition. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and fin ancial institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. The book traces the successive rise of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam as commercial cities between 1250 and 1650, showing how dominant cities feared being displaced by challengers while lesser ones sought to keep up by cultivating policies favorable to trade. It argues that it was this competitive urban network that promoted open access institutions in the Low Countries, and emphasizes the central role played by the urban magistrates in fostering these inclusive institutional arrangements. The book describes how the city fathers resisted the predatory or reckless actions of their territorial rulers, and how their nonrestrictive approach to commercial life succeeded in attracting merchants from all over Europe. It intervenes in an important debate on the growth of trade in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Challenging influential theories that attribute this commercial expansion to the political strength of merchants, the book demonstrates how urban competition fostered the creation of inclusive institutions in international trade.

The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. This book takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at the bank before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments-and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank. The book explains how financial operators and financial products coexist and how this coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. The book is also a case study of economic derivation, but rather than look at derivatives as a class of economic goods, it studies derivation as a process.

From 1940 to 1970, nearly four million black migrants left the American rural South to settle in the industrial cities of the North and West. This book provides a comprehensive account of the long-lasting effects of the influx of black workers on labor markets and urban space in receiving areas. Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. This book challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. The book shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth. Furthermore, many white households responded to the black migration by relocating to the suburbs. White flight was motivated not only by neighborhood racial change but also by the desire on the part of white residents to avoid participating in the local public services and fiscal obligations of increasingly diverse cities. Employing historical census data and state-of-the-art econometric methods, this book revises our understanding of the Great Black Migration and its role in the transformation of American society.

Throughout the world, the rule against price fixing is competition law's most important and least controversial prohibition. Yet there is far less consensus than meets the eye on what constitutes price fixing, and prevalent understandings conflict with the teachings of oligopoly theory that supposedly underlie modern competition policy. This book offers a fresh, in-depth exploration of competition law's horizontal agreement requirement, presents a systematic analysis of how best to address the problem of coordinated oligopolistic price elevation, and compares the resulting direct approach to the orthodox prohibition. The book elaborates the relevant benefits and costs of potential solutions, investigates how coordinated price elevation is best detected in light of the error costs associated with different types of proof, and examines appropriate sanctions. Existing literature devotes remarkably little attention to these key subjects and instead concerns itself with limiting penalties to certain sorts of interfirm communications. Challenging conventional wisdom, the book shows how this circumscribed view is less well grounded in the statutes, principles, and precedents of competition law than is a more direct, functional proscription. More important, by comparison to the communications-based prohibition, the book explains how the direct approach targets situations that involve both greater social harm and less risk of chilling desirable behavior—and is also easier to apply.

Complexity science—made possible by modern analytical and computational advances—is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists’ policy models have not kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking away from creative, innovative policy solutions. This book outlines a new, more flexible policy narrative, which envisions society as a complex evolving system that is uncontrollable but can be influenced. The book describes how economists and society became locked into the current policy framework, and lay out fresh alternatives for framing policy questions. Offering original solutions to stubborn problems, the complexity narrative builds on broader philosophical traditions, such as those in the work of John Stuart Mill, to suggest initiatives that the authors call “activist laissez-faire” policies. The book develops innovative bottom-up solutions that, through new institutional structures such as for-benefit corporations, channel individuals’ social instincts into solving societal problems, making profits a tool for change rather than a goal. It argues that a central role for government in this complexity framework is to foster an ecostructure within which diverse forms of social entrepreneurship can emerge and blossom.

Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. This book shows that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers. The book describes how, for thousands of generations, cooperation with fellow group members has been essential to survival. Groups that created institutions to protect the civic-minded from exploitation by the selfish flourished and prevailed in conflicts with less cooperative groups. Key to this process was the evolution of social emotions such as shame and guilt, and our capacity to internalize social norms so that acting ethically became a personal goal rather than simply a prudent way to avoid punishment. Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the coevolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, the book provides a compelling and novel account of human cooperation.

Today's wine industry is characterized by regional differences not only in the wines themselves but also in the business models by which these wines are produced, marketed, and distributed. In Old World countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, small family vineyards and cooperative wineries abound. In New World regions like the United States and Australia, the industry is dominated by a handful of very large producers. This is the first book to trace the economic and historical forces that gave rise to very distinctive regional approaches to creating wine. The book shows how the wine industry was transformed in the decades leading up to the First World War. Population growth, rising wages, and the railways all contributed to soaring European consumption even as many vineyards were decimated by the vine disease phylloxera. At the same time, new technologies led to a major shift in production away from Europe's traditional winemaking regions. Small family producers in Europe developed institutions such as regional appellations and cooperatives to protect their commercial interests as large integrated companies built new markets in America and elsewhere. The book examines how Old and New World producers employed diverging strategies to adapt to the changing global wine industry. The book includes chapters on Europe's cheap commodity wine industry; the markets for sherry, port, claret, and champagne; and the new wine industries in California, Australia, and Argentina.

The world has become increasingly separated into the haves and have nots. This book shows how a contented class—not the privileged few but the socially and economically advantaged majority—defend their comfortable status at a cost. Middle-class voting against regulation and increased taxation that would remedy pressing social ills has created a culture of immediate gratification, leading to complacency and hampering long-term progress. Only economic disaster, military action, or the eruption of an angry underclass seem capable of changing the status quo. A groundbreaking critique, the book shows how the complacent majority captures the political process and determines economic policy.

The exchange rate is the most important price in any economy, since it affects all other prices. Exchange rates are set, either directly or indirectly, by government policy. Exchange rates are also central to the global economy, for they profoundly influence all international economic activity. Despite the critical role of exchange rate policy, there are few definitive explanations of why governments choose the currency policies they do. Filled with in-depth cases and examples, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the politics surrounding exchange rates. Identifying the motivations for currency policy preferences on the part of industries seeking to influence politicians, the book shows how each industry's characteristics—including its exposure to currency risk and the price effects of exchange rate movements—determine those preferences. The book evaluates the accuracy of this theoretical argument in a variety of historical and geographical settings: it looks at the politics of the gold standard, particularly in the United States, and examines the political economy of European monetary integration. It also analyzes the politics of Latin American currency policy over the past forty years, and focuses on the daunting currency crises that have frequently debilitated Latin American nations, including Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. With a mix of narrative and statistical investigation, the book clarifies the political and economic determinants of exchange rate policies.

Over-the-counter (OTC) markets for derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and repurchase agreements played a significant role in the global financial crisis. Rather than being traded through a centralized institution such as a stock exchange, OTC trades are negotiated privately between market participants who may be unaware of prices that are currently available elsewhere in the market. In these relatively opaque markets, investors can be in the dark about the most attractive available terms and who might be offering them. This opaqueness exacerbated the financial crisis, as regulators and market participants were unable to quickly assess the risks and pricing of these instruments. This book offers a concise introduction to OTC markets by explaining key conceptual issues and modeling techniques, and by providing readers with a foundation for more advanced subjects in this field. The book covers the basic methods for modeling search and random matching in economies with many agents. It gives an overview of asset pricing in OTC markets with symmetric and asymmetric information, showing how information percolates through these markets as investors encounter each other over time. The book also features appendixes containing methodologies supporting the more theory-oriented of the chapters, making this the most self-contained introduction to OTC markets available.

Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior. Challenging this long-held view, this book argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for bacalao—dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period—the book shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. The book reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid. The book offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.

The global financial crisis highlighted the impact on macroeconomic outcomes of recurrent events like business and financial cycles, highs and lows in volatility, and crashes and recessions. At the most basic level, such recurrent events can be summarized using binary indicators showing if the event will occur or not. These indicators are constructed either directly from data or indirectly through models. Because they are constructed, they have different properties than those arising in microeconometrics, and how one is to use them depends a lot on the method of construction. This book presents the econometric methods necessary for the successful modeling of recurrent events, providing valuable insights for policymakers, empirical researchers, and theorists. It explains why it is inherently difficult to forecast the onset of a recession in a way that provides useful guidance for active stabilization policy, with the consequence that policymakers should place more emphasis on making the economy robust to recessions. The book offers a range of econometric tools and techniques that researchers can use to measure recurrent events, summarize their properties, and evaluate how effectively economic and statistical models capture them. These methods also offer insights for developing models that are consistent with observed financial and real cycles.

This book presents a compelling and accessible history of economic ideas, from Aristotle through the twentieth century. Examining theories of the past that have a continuing modern resonance, the book shows that economics is not a timeless, objective science, but is continually evolving as it is shaped by specific times and places. From Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution to those of John Maynard Keynes after the Great Depression, the book demonstrates that if economic ideas are to remain relevant, they must continually adapt to the world they inhabit. A lively examination of economic thought in historical context, the book shows how the field has evolved across the centuries.

Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. government willingly deployed power, hard and soft, to protect American investments all around the globe. Why did the United States get into the business of defending its citizens' property rights abroad? This book looks at how modern U.S. involvement in the empire business began, how American foreign policy became increasingly tied to the sway of private financial interests, and how postwar administrations finally extricated the United States from economic interventionism, even though the government had the will and power to continue. The book examines the ways that American investors initially influenced their government to intercede to protect investments in locations such as Central America and the Caribbean. Costs were small—at least at the outset—but with each incremental step, American policy became increasingly entangled with the goals of those they were backing, making disengagement more difficult. The book discusses how, all the way through the 1970s, the United States not only failed to resist pressure to defend American investments, but also remained unsuccessful at altering internal institutions of other countries in order to make property rights secure in the absence of active American involvement. Foreign nations expropriated American investments, but in almost every case the U.S. government's employment of economic sanctions or covert action obtained market value or more in compensation—despite the growing strategic risks. The advent of institutions focusing on international arbitration finally gave the executive branch a credible political excuse not to act. The book cautions that these institutions are now under strain and that a collapse might open the empire trap once more.