Primitive and Non-metallic Money -- Monetary System of Ancient Asia: China -- Monetary System of the Ancient Regime -- Medieval Debasement and Seigniorage -- Gresham's Law -- Flows of Precious Metals and Prices in Europe -- Rise and Decline of the Global Silver Standard -- Money, Trade, and...

This paper documents nominal stability in Switzerland from 1805 to 2013 using a data set on annual price, wage and nominal GDP changes. The trends of these indicators are estimated by an unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model in order to control for short-term fluctuations and...

The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though Bitcoin has been much discussed in recent years, a basic understanding of how it and gold would work as monetary standards is rare....