This article explores the determinants of price level fluctuations in Britain during the first suspension of the gold standard over the 1797-1821 period. I find that the contemporary price level was determined by world gold prices and expectations regarding the resumption of the gold standard at...

Between 1797 and 1821, Britain suspended the gold standard in order to finance the Napoleonic Wars. This measure was accompanied by large scale debt accumulation and inflation: After Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the debt to GDP ratio had climbed to 226%; the price level...

We analyse the dynamics of the pass-through of banks’ marginal cost to bank lending rates over the 2008 crisis and the euro area sovereign debt crisis in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. We measure banks’ marginal cost by their rate on new deposits, contrary to the...

The purpose of this article is to study the trends in per capita productivity in several major industrialised countries. The analysis is first based on annual data over a long period spanning the entire 20th century for the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Productivity trends are...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task, because stock markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance asset allocation. Moments of market...

Based on a dataset of 112 emerging economies and developing countries, this paper addresses the question whether the accumulation of international reserves has effectively protected countries during the 2008-09 financial crisis. More specifically, the paper investigates the relation between...

Aggregate consumption growth risk explains why low interest rate currencies do not appreciate as much as the interest rate differential and why high interest rate currencies do not depreciate as much as the interest rate differential. Domestic investors earn negative excess returns on low...

This article analyzes the hysteresis hypothesis in the unemployment rates of the four French overseas regions (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion) [FORs] over the period 1993-2008. We use standard univariate and panel unit root tests, among them Choi (2006) and Lopez (2009) that account for...

This paper aims to complete our understanding of the relationship between changes in nominal effective exchange rates and prices in the new EU member states. We investigate the exchange rate pass-through to import, producer and consumer prices for ten Central and Eastern European countries with...