In a recent NBER paper, Cutsail and Grubb argue that North Carolina's colonial bills of credit were valued like discount bonds, with a current market value largely determined by the discounted value of the bills when paid into the treasury in taxes or other public payments. Grubb has previously...

In a recent article in the Economic History Review, Celia and Grubb liken colonial Maryland's dollar-denominated bills of credit to discount securities, circulating at less than their face value. This note argues that the bills in question circulated at par with specie and were treated as...

Farley Grubb has recently published a series of papers addressing the monetary and financial history of colonial New Jersey. These papers purport that the best way to explain the value of colonial currencies in general, and New Jersey’s colonial currency in particular, is to consider them...

Farley Grubb has developed an ambitious new money-stock time series for colonial Pennsylvania that uses the ingenious method of examining newspaper advertisements promising rewards (e.g., for help in catching runaway slaves) to estimate monies in circulation (Grubb 2004). Grubb asserts that...

New France, like most European colonies in the New World, suffered from a persistent shortage of metal coins. As Quebec could only legally import from France, their standards of living were constrained by their ability to export a few primary products (mostly fur, cod, timber and wheat)....

A new approach to explaining the value of colonial paper money that relies on their distinctive character as bills of credit is presented. The market value of these bills is decomposed into their real asset present value and their liquidity premium value. This approach is applied to the newly...

If they could be believed, Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to scholarship and public policy. This paper shows, however, that Grubb's papers should not be believed. Grubb's key assumption, that the medium of exchange can be...

During the colonial era, the French colonial government in Canada experimented with paper money printed on the back of playing cards. The first experiment lasted from 1685 to 1719. In the first years, there was little inflation in spite of a rapidly expanding stock of playing card money. It is...

We show that decentralized privately created money with unstable values can hinder the traded, more transaction-friction sensitive, sector of the economy. We do so in the context of the NationalBanking Act of 1864 in the United States that created a new federally-regulated, fully-backed currency...

Can tight and centralized financial regulations prevent financial crises? Governments usually respond to financial crises with tightening and centralizing financial regulations. In this paper, we explore the historical parallels between the governmental responses to the financial crises at the...