Our paper examines Charles Goodhart's work on the history of monetary institutions: central bank operations under the gold standard, their behaviour in relation to the financial system in which they functioned, including their responses to banking crises, and their performance as lenders of last...

This paper investigates the impact historically of aggregate price shocks on financial stability in the United Kingdom. We construct an annual index of U.K. financial conditions for 1790-1999 and use a dynamic probit model to estimate the effect of aggregate price shocks on the index. We find...

In this paper we analyze the operation of the inter-war gold exchange standard to see if the evident credibility of the system conferred on participating central banks the ability to pursue independent monetary policies. To answer this question we econometrically analyze two key parity, or...

A decade has passed since Robert Lucas asked why capital does not flow from rich to poor countries. Lucas used a contemporary example to illustrate his Paradox, the very modest flow of capital from the United States to India during the second great global capital market boom, after 1970. Had he...

This paper examines the recently noted finding that the Classical gold standard represented a credible, well-behaved target zone system from the perspective of the well-documented failure of countries to play by the rules of the game in the classical period. In particular, we test an hypothesis...

We compare the resumption of convertibility into gold by the United States in 1879 and Britain in 1925 to ascertain the degree to which the outcomes reflected differences in strategies adopted by the authorities or in the external environment. It is concluded that external factors were the most...

Previous evidence, most recently by Bordo and Jonung (1990) and Silclos (1988b, 1991), has shown on a country-by-country basis that proxies for institutional change significantly improve our understanding of the long-run behaviour of velocity and. consequently, of the demand for money. If...

Due primarily to transport improvements, commodity prices in Britain and America tended to equalize 1870-1913. This commodity price equalization was not simply manifested by the great New World grain invasion of Europe. Rather, it can be documented for intermediate primary products and...

Why did international capital flows rise to such heights in the late 19th century, the years between 1907 and 1913 in particular? Britain placed half of her annual savings abroad during those seven years, and 76 percent of it went to the New World countries of Canada, Australia, the USA,...

The Napoleonic Wars offer an experiment unique in the history of wartime finance. While Britain was forced off the gold standard and endured a sustained inflation, France remained on a bimetallic standard for the war's duration. For wars of comparable length and intensity in the nineteenth and...