Conventional wisdom has that peripheral economies had to `play by the rules of the game` under the Classical Gold Standard (1870s-1914), while core countries could get away with frequent violations. Drawing on the experience of three core economies (England, France, Germany) and seven peripheral...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income.  This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993), Voth (1998, 2000)).  This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour...

The existence of a self-regulating arbitrage mechanism under the gold standard has been traditionally considered as one of its main advantages, and attracted a corresponding research interest. This research is arguably relevant not only to test for the efficiency of the gold points, but also to...

What were the economic consequences of the usury doctrine in the Middle Ages?  We examine how merchants attempted to evade the prohibition on interest and the attempts of the Church to clamp down on evasion.  Contrary to the views of many economists and historians, the usury prohibition...

Information on the performance of equities during the latter part of the globalized long nineteenth century is scarce, particularly for smaller European economies such as Ireland.  Using a dataset of over 35,000 price-year observations from the Investor's Monthly Manual, this paper constructs...

This paper surveys the causes and consequences of late 19th century globalization, as well as the anti-globalization backlash of that period.

This paper introduces a new dataset of French investments in foreign securities.  This is the most detailed data available to date.  The data is used to study the composition, valuation, and total return of the French portfolio of non-sovereign foreign securities on the 34 years before World...

The paper presents trade policy as in line with that of other continental European powers, with a move to moderate levels of tariff protection for politically sensitive sectors such as steel and textiles and clothing, but also in agriculture, with levels of protection falling slightly before the...

Contemporaries and historians have highlighted London's position as the world's leading financial centre, and its dominance of both trade financing and international capital investment at this time.  The current historical literature focuses on the presence of the London Stock Exchange and...

Jones (1971) examines a three-factor two-good model under the assumption that two of the factors are specific to one sector (a different sector for each such factor). In this paper that specification is weakened, so that only one sector (agriculture) has a specific factor (land). When land is a...