This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers’ reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup...

This paper shows that modern monetary theory can be better understood through the differences between Menger and Walras. Since the 1980s attempts to establish coherent microfoundations for monetary exchange have brought Menger's theory of the origin of money to the forefront and sent walrasian...

We study the role played by coin experts, called moneychangers, in the metallic money system. To do that, we introduce intermediaries that can expertise and certify coins into the VeldeWeber and Wright’s (1999) model of commodity money with imperfectly recognizable coins. We show under which...

This paper is an empirical study of the distribution of black prices among 120 Bavarian locations at two dates, the beginning of July, 1947 and the end of June, 1948. It shows huge differences in the liquidity of those goods either when measured with the coefficient of variation or the number of...

The financial market was very developed in France in the years before World War I and subsequently many newspapers provided information to investors. Yet, contemporaries blamed the inaccuracy and biases of the financial press. This study implements a quantitative test to assess this judgment....