This paper provides a new methodology to map international monetary relations in the 19th century. We identify an index of international liquidity and, applying techniques borrowed from formal network analysis (in particular, blockmodelling) we produce a formal ranking of currencies according to...

This paper exploits arbitrage conditions for bills of exchange with different maturities to provide new evidence on commercial interest rates in Amsterdam, London, and Paris during the 18th century. The lesson that emerges is that commercial interest rates were very low in all three centers and...

Using a new database for the late 19th century, when the pound sterling circulated all over the world, this paper provides the first review of critical empirical issues in the economics of international currencies. First, we report evidence in favor of the search-theoretic approach to...

In this article, we study Europe's monetary geography on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Our unit of analysis is the city and we explore inter-city linkages. Important findings include a considerable degree of integration and multilateralism with monetary centers having already emerged as...

This paper develops a new insight enabling the empirical study of media capture: minority shareholders of newspapers and readers face similar risks. Both are adversely affected when corrupt insiders use the newspaper for personal profit and receive invisible revenues. This means that relevant...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. We study the process through which they received this regulatory license. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the...

This paper studies how private banks dealt with sovereign risk before World War I. At that time there was no multilateral institution to bail out borrowers in default and sovereign rating had not yet developed. All the burden of information collection and processing was borne out by individual...

This Paper challenges a popular explanation for ‘original sin’ - the default prone borrowing of long term debt in foreign exchange by emerging markets - that emphasizes the lack of credibility and commitment of governments that prevents them from borrowing in their own currency. Basing our...

A natural experiment with an exchange-rate band in Austria-Hungary in the early 20th century provides a rare opportunity to discuss critical aspects of the theory of target zones. Providing a new derivation of the target zone model as a set of nested hypotheses, the inference is drawn that...