This paper examines Latvia's foreign trade and investment relations with Germany and Russia during the interwar period and the period after the restoration of independence up to now. During the period between the two world wars Latvia's foreign trade was completely integrated into the European...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlations between (a) deflation and depression and (b) unexpected deflation and depression. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected deflation or inflation for 26 countries from 1922 to 1939. The results...

We characterize an optimal redistributive pension scheme when individuals face temptation, but can exert costly self-control (as in Gul & Pesendorfer, 2001; 2004). Our results challenge the common wisdom that forced savings tend to reduce individuals' mental cost of self-control. In our model,...

Under what conditions can policymakers make demonstrably poor policy choices? By providing a new account of monetary policy management in the Netherlands during the interwar gold standard, we show how policymakers can fail to escape their long-held beliefs and refuse to consider available policy...

What precisely were the causes and consequences of the trade wars in the 1930s? Were there perhaps deeper forces at work in reorienting global trade prior to the outbreak of World War II? And what lessons may this particular historical episode provide for the present day? To answer these...

The paper examines the timing of exit from the interwar gold-exchange standard for a panel of European countries, based on monthly data over the period January 1928 - December 1936. I show that exit from gold can be understood in terms of a trade-off between a limited set of factors commonly...

This paper constructs annual GDP estimates for Ireland (1924-47) to join the first complete official aggregates. The new series is deployed to revisit Ireland's economic performance in the post-independence decades. Ireland's economy grew at 1.5 per cent per annum and average living standards...

It is well known that after the First World War there was a massive flight of capital from the major European countries to foreign financial centres. It is surprising, however, to note that no historian to date has actually taken the trouble to make a detailed study of the phenomenon. The aim of...

The ‘Great Recession’ has rekindled discussions about the relationship between economic crisis and democratic breakdown, frequently based on analogies with interwar experiences. However, while the notion that economic crisis in general and the Great Depression in particular caused democratic...

We characterize an optimal redistributive pension scheme when individuals face temptation, but can exert costly self-control (as in Gul & Pesendorfer, 2001; 2004). Our results challenge the common wisdom that forced savings tend to reduce individuals' mental cost of self-control. In our model,...