CEP Discussion Paper No 986 June 2010 Currency Unions in Prospect and Retrospect

Currency Unions in Prospect and Retrospect

We critically review the recent literature on currency unions and discuss the methodological challenges posed by the empirical assessment of their costs and benefits. In the process, we provide evidence on the economic effects of the euro. In particular, and in contrast with estimates of the trade effect of other currency unions, we find that the euro’s impact on trade has been close to zero. A...

Currency Boards in Retrospect and Prospect (Introduction)

Modeling spatio-temporal relationships: retrospect and prospect

CEP Discussion Paper No 1153 June 2012 Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice ?

We investigated experimentally whether people can be induced to believe in a non-existent expert, and subsequently pay for what can only be described as transparently useless advice about future chance events. Consistent with the theoretical predictions made by Rabin (2002) and Rabin and Vayanos (2010), we show empirically that the answer is yes and that the size of the error made systematicall...

Estimating the Effect of Currency Unions

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade; crosssectional evidence indicates that trade stimulates output. This paper estimates the effect that currency union has, via trade, on output per capita. We use economic and geographic data for over 200 countries to quantify the implications of currency unions for trade and output, pursuing a two-stage approa...