This paper examines the historical origins of "Original Sin" or why countries are unable to issue long term debt domestically or borrow abroad in terms of the domestic currency. We conduct an historical case study for a group of countries that had largely overcome the problem of Original Sin by...

This paper tests the hypothesis that idiosyncratic U.S. disturbances and their international propagation can account for the global Depression. Exploiting common stochastic trends in U.S. and Canadian interwar data, we estimate a small open economy model for Canada that decomposes output...

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...

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...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...

An analogy has been made between the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the recent Eurozone crisis. The build up of TARGET balances in the Eurosystem of Central Banks after 2007 with the GIPS (deficit countries having large liabilities) and Germany (a surplus country) with large...