Why Did Argentina's Currency Board Collapse?

Why Did Venezuelan Growth Collapse?1

Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse ?

Each tower of the World Trade Center was designed to withstand, as a whole, the horizontal impact of a large commercial aircraft. Why, then, did total collapse occur? Zden ek P. Ba zant, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science at Northwestern University, and Yong Zhou, a graduate research assistant at Northwestern, suggest that the collapse was the dynamic conseque...

Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse?—Simple Analysis

This paper presents a simplified approximate analysis of the overall collapse of the towers of World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed. DOI: 10.1061/~ASCE!0733-9399~2002!128:1~2! CE Database keywords: New York; New York City...

Why are Currency Crises Contagious?

Executive Summary Currency crises tend to be regional. Since macroeconomic and financial phenomena are not regional, these phenomena are unimportant in understanding why crises spread. But international trade is regional, as countries tend to trade with their neighbors. This suggests that trade links are important in understanding how currency crises spread, above and beyond any macroeconomic p...

Why Not a Global Currency?

It appears likely that the number of currencies in the world, having proliferated along with the number of countries over the past 50 years, will decline sharply over the next two decades. The question I plan to pose here is: where, from an economic point of view, should we aim for this process to stop? Should there be a single world currency, as Richard Cooper (1984) boldly envisioned? Should ...