international crisis, doctrinal conflict and american exceptionalism in the federal reserve 1913-1932

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers’ acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass’ and Henry P. Willis’ insistence on one specific interpretation of the “real bills doctrine”, the idea that the financial system should be organized around commercial bills. The Glass- Willis doctrine, which stressed non-intervention and the self-liquidating nature of real bills, created doubts about the eligibility of frozen acceptances for purchase and rediscount at the Reserve Banks and caused accepting banks to curtail their supply to the market. The Glass-Willis doctrine is embedded in a broader historical narrative that links Woodrow Wilson’s approach to foreign policy with the collapse of the international order in 1931

The Interwar Trade Collapse Revisited

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance, international borders, and the payment system on trade. My results suggest that had average tariff and non-tariff trade barriers remained at their 1928 level, total international trade would have been 64.6% higher in 1937. Had the gold standard not collapsed in 1931 and had the British Empire not departed to establish its own currency and trade blocs, international trade would have been 3% larger. Finally, had transport costs remained at their 1928 level, global trade would not have been significantly different nine years on. These results are supported by over 6,000 new hand-collected observations of ad-valorem ocean freight rates for cotton, which show an average increase of only 1.2 percentage points between 1928 and 1936. When expressed as an index, the movement of freight rates mirrors the evolution of the elasticity of trade to distance over the period

The Transactions Demand for Money in Chile

This paper examines the transactions demand for money in Chile over the period from 1986 to 2000. Using systems cointegration methods suggested by Johansen (1995), we find that although macroeconomic data for Chile exhibit strong trend-stationarity during this period it is possible to recover relatively robust single-equation specifications for the transactions demand for money. Error-correction models in which money demand is conditioned on real wealth, the level of economic activity, and the nominal Central Bank policy rate provide robust basis for inference. Controlling for a shift in velocity in the end of 1998 the models exhibit a high-degree of out-of-sample predictive power over the period from 1998 to mid 2000.

The conduct of monetary policy in Uganda: an assessment

Money supply, Liquidity, Cash flows, Demand and Price Analysis, Financial Economics, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, International Relations/Trade, Public Economics,

All finite transitive graphs admit self-adjoint free semigroupoid algebras

In this paper we show that every non-cycle finite transitive directed graph has a Cuntz-Krieger family whose WOT-closed algebra is $B(\mathcal{H})$. This is accomplished through a new construction that reduces this problem to in-degree $2$-regular graphs, which is then treated by applying the periodic Road Coloring Theorem of B\'eal and Perrin. As a consequence we show that finite disjoint unions of finite transitive directed graphs are exactly those finite graphs which admit self-adjoint free semigroupoid algebras.Comment: Added missing reference. 16 pages 2 figure

Novel, Inexpensive Portable Respiratory Protection Unit (PRPU) for Healthcare Workers

Introduction: Given concern for increased aerosolization during intubation of patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, we sought to create a portable, inexpensive, and easily constructed device to help protect healthcare workers.Methods: A respiratory protection unit can be constructed in approximately 30 minutes and for less than 50 United States dollars in materials, using polyvinylchloride pipe and automobile collision wrap.Conclusion: This device provides possible increased protection during video laryngoscopy and can easily be replicated

Modelling multilateral trade resistance in a gravity model with exchange rate regimes

In estimating a gravity model it is essential to analyse not just bilateral trade resistance, the barriers to trade between a pair of countries, but also multilateral trade resistance (MTR), the barriers to trade that each country faces with all its trading partners. Without correctly modelling MTR, it is impossible either to obtain accurate estimates of the effects on trade of exchange rate regimes and other variables or to perform accurate counterfactual simulations of trade patterns under other assumptions about exchange rate regimes or other variables. In this paper we implement a number of different ways of modelling MTR – both for a standard gravity model and for an extended model which includes a full range of bilateral exchange rate regimes – notably several variants of the technique developed by Baier and Bergstrand (2006), which turn out to produce broadly similar results. We then illustrate our preferred approach by carrying out simulations of the effects of the creation of an East African currency union and the effects of a withdrawal from EMU by Italy.gravity, geography, trade, exchange rate regime, currency union, transactions costs, multilateral trade resistance.

Aid, Public Expenditure and Dutch Disease

Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply side impact of aidâfinanced public expenditure. We develop a simple model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure capital generates an inter-temporal productivity spillover for both tradable and non-tradable sectors, where these productivity effects may display sector-specific biases. The model also allows for non-homothetic demands. We then use an extended version of this model, calibrated to contemporary conditions in Uganda, to simulate the effect of a step increase in net aid flows. Our simulations show that beyond the short-run, where Dutch disease effects are present, the relationship between enhanced aid flows, real exchange rates and welfare is less straightforward than simple models of aid suggest. We show that public infrastructure which generates a productivity bias in favour of non-tradable production delivers the largest aggregate return to aid, with the real exchange rate appreciation reduced or reversed and enhanced export performance, but it does so at the cost of a deterioration in the income distribution. Income gains accrue predominantly to urban skilled and unskilled households, leaving the rural poor relatively worse off. Under plausible parameterizations of the model the rural poor may also be worse ff in absolute terms.Aid, Dutch Disease, Public Expenditure, Africa

Exchange rate regimes and trade

A ‘new version’ gravity model, is used to estimate the effect of a full range of de facto exchange rate regimes, as classified by Reinhart and Rogoff (2004), on bilateral trade. The results indicate that, while participation in a common currency union is typically strongly ‘pro-trade’– as first suggested by Rose (2000) – other exchange rate regimes which lower the exchange rate uncertainty and transactions costs associated with international trade between countries are significantly more pro-trade than the default regime of a ‘double float’. They suggest that the direct and indirect effects of exchange rate regimes on uncertainty and transactions costs tend to outweigh the trade-diverting substitution effects. In addition, there is evidence that membership of different currency unions by two countries has pro-trade effects, which can be understood in terms of a large indirect effect on transactions costs. Tariff-equivalent monetary barriers associated with each of the exchange rate regimes are also calculatedgravity, geography, exchange rate regime, currency union, transactions costs, tariff-equivalent barriers