Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

Interconnections between banking crises and fiscal crises have a long history. We document the long-run evolution from classic banking panics towards modern banking crises where financial guarantees are associated with crisis resolution. Recent crises feature a feedback loop between bank...

The paper looks at the development of the secular stagnation thesis, in the context of the economic history of the time. It explores some 19th century antecedents of the thesis, before turning to its interwar development. Not only Alvin Hansen, but Keynes and Hicks were involved in the...

The history of the twentieth century can be summarized excessively briefly in five propositions: First, that the history of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly economic history. Second, that the twentieth century saw the material wealth of humankind explode beyond all previous imagining....

What can macroeconomic history offer macroeconomic theorists and macroeconometricians? Macroeconomic history offers more than longer time series or special `controlled experiments.' It suggests an historical definition of the economy, which has implications for macroeconometric methods. The...

We discuss business cycles in ancient China. Data on Ancient China business cycles are sparse and incomplete and so our discussion is qualitative rather than quantitative. Essentially, ancient debates focused on two types of cycles: long run political or dynastic cycles of many decades, and...

David Ricardo initially believed machinery would help workers but revised his opinion, likely based on the impact of automation in the textile industry. Despite cotton textiles becoming one of the largest sectors in the British economy, real wages for cotton weavers did not rise for decades. As...