Financial collapse in the winter of 1933, culminating in the "bank holiday" of early March, was a climactic event. It ended the downswing phase of the great depression. It produced widespread losses to depositors and owners of bank capital, which, soon after, led to the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission, separation of commercial and investment banking, federal deposit insurance, and other landmark financial legislation. It put an end to the gold standard in the U.S., followed in a few years by the remaining adherents of that standard.(JEL D2; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 1-19, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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This paper uses the structural vector autoregressive approach to assess the significance of buffer stock money under alternative real shocks in the U.S. economy over the 1960-96 period. Buffer stock effects are shown to play a minor role when oil price shocks are explicitly considered. (JEL E41; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 20-30, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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This paper provides the results of an empirical study of the dispersion of consumer price inflation for each of 19 product groups across 11 European countries using monthly data covering the 1980s. The study relates the degree of inflation dispersion in a market to the mean inflation rate. Thus, we show how differential price changes across European markets are influenced by inflation. A model of asymmetric response of relative inflation variability to inflation is tested. Hypotheses are also tested regarding broad categories of traded, nontraded, and regulated products, and results are provided for individual product groups. (JEL C23, D21, D43, E31, F14, F15; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 31-47, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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As a leader in providing banking services in the global market, it is important to understand the variables that influence U.S. exports in banking services. This paper examines the influence that trade, sovereign credit ratings, and exchange market pressure have on U.S. exports of banking services. The empirical evidence indicates that higher trade activity and a higher sovereign credit rating reduce U.S. exports of banking services. The results also suggest that exchange market pressure positively affects U.S. exports of banking services. Tests for individual and random effects across units suggest most of the variation in the estimators is within units. (JEL F1, F3, G2; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 48-62, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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Many studies reveal that male-female wage differentials increase with the level of unemployment, suggesting that women are hurt by a recession more than men. However, the 1990-94 economic recession in Spain contributed to reduce the gender wage gap by almost 5 percentage points (from 83.94 percent in 1990 to 90.44 percent in 1994). This was mainly due to the relative increase in services industry employment, the activity where the gender wage gap is the lowest. (JEL J21, J31, J41; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 63-74, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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This paper estimates a fixed effects tariff model to study the impact of the tariff reform provisions of international agreements on domestic tariffs, using a sample of eight Sub-Saharan African countries. The structure of the model explaining domestic tariff changed from the preagreement period to the postagreement period. However, the results indicate that for the most part, efforts by governments to adhere to tariff agreements failed in all but a few countries. Even for the countries in which the agreements appeared to be successful, the significance of the results is relatively weak. (JEL O0, O1; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 75-86, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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This paper elaborates upon the effect of political stability on economic growth using a novel approach. Unlike the literature on growth that emphasizes the turnover of decision makers, this paper focuses on the volatility of economic policies as the relevant indicator of stability. The literature on growth ignores the microeconomic instability associated with frequent changes of government policies. The empirical results of this paper indicate that the effect of political instability on economic growth is not conclusive. Most of the commonly used proxies for political instability have failed to explain growth differences across countries. The political instability indices have no significant effect on growth when a reasonable set of core variables is also included in the regression equation. The results also show that almost all of the policy uncertainty variables are significantly and negatively correlated with economic growth. However, the instability of economic policies has no significant impact on the accumulation of capital. (JEL O17, O40, P51; Atlantic Econ. J., 29(1): pp. 87-106, Mar. 01. ©All Rights Reserved)

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