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We use new, comprehensive micro data on oil fields to build and estimate a structural model of the oil industry embedded in a general equilibrium model of the world economy. In the model, firms that belong to Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) act as a cartel. The remaining firms are a competitive fringe. We use the model to study the macroeconomic impact of the advent of fracking. Fracking weakens the OPEC cartel, leading to a large long-run decline in oil prices. Fracking also reduces the volatility of oil prices in the long run because fracking firms can respond more quickly to changes in oil demand.

We extend the canonical epidemiology model to study the interaction between economic decisions and epidemics. Our model implies that people cut back on consumption and work to reduce the chances of being infected. These decisions reduce the severity of the epidemic but exacerbate the size of the associated recession. The competitive equilibrium is not socially optimal because infected people do not fully internalize the effect of their economic decisions on the spread of the virus. In our benchmark model, the best simple containment policy increases the severity of the recession but saves roughly half a million lives in the United States.

Market participants routinely take advantage of the failure of uncovered interest rate parity to speculate in currency markets. Perhaps the most widely used currency speculation strategy is the carry trade. In this article we take the perspective of an individual currency trader and document the gains to diversifying the carry trade across different currencies. We show that these gains are large. Diversification boosts the typical Sharpe ratio by over 50%.

We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, whereas overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive. Both expectation shocks and overconfidence can increase business-cycle volatility, while preserving the model's properties in terms of comovement and relative volatilities. In contrast, optimism is not a useful source of volatility in our model. (JEL: E3)

One of the most striking regularities of the growth process is the massive reallocation of labour from agriculture into industry and services. Balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts about economic growth. Unfortunately, these models are inconsistent with the structural change dynamics that are a central feature of economic development. This paper discusses models with generalized balanced growth paths. These paths retain some of the key features of balanced growth, but are consistent with the observed labour reallocations dynamics. The conventional explanation for the observed patterns of structural change is that the rate of technical progress has been higher in agriculture than in services. We show that this pattern of technical progress is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the observed dynamics of structural change. The key to producing these reallocation dynamics are differences in the income elasticity of the demand for the goods produced by the different sectors.

Towards EMU without the EMS Paul De Grauwe This paper examines the causes of the breakdown of the EMS, arguing that EMS credibility has always been impaired by recessions. This has relevance both for the future of monetary union in Europe and for the path by which it might be attained. I argue that, in comparison with the ERM, the present more flexible exchange rate arrangements will ease, not exacerbate, some of the technical problems in making the transition to EMU. I then analyse the political economy of monetary union and identify the main stumbling blocks that remain. Finally, I set out a specific proposal that takes advantage of the new opportunities to move forward towards EMU.

Default risk Alberto Alesina, Mark De Broeck, Alessandro Prati and Guido Tabellini Different European countries pay very different interest rates on their public debts. Will these differences disappear if and when exchange rates come to be irrevocably fixed in the European Monetary Union? Or rather will default risks in the high debt countries keep interest rates from converging? To answer this question, this paper investigates whether a perceived default risk is already priced by the market The paper compares the interest rates on public and private financial instruments denominated in the same currencies in 12 OECD countries. A strong correlation is found between the size of public indebtedness and the spread between public and private rates of return. This correlation suggests that the markets perceive a default risk on the public debt of some OECD countries. The size of this default risk is however very small.