The Gold Pool (1961-1968) was one of the most ambitious cases of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions – sharing profits and losses – to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was in fact tied...

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...

Can autocracies win electoral support by showcasing economic competence? We analyze a famous case – the building of the Autobahn network in Nazi Germany. Using newly collected data, we show that highway construction was effective in boosting popular support, helping to entrench the Nazi...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...

Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

What is the role of foreign currency debt in precipitating financial crises? In this paper we assemble data for nearly 30 countries between 1880 and 1913 and examine debt crises, currency crises, banking crises and twin crises. We pay special attention to the role of foreign currency and gold...

We distinguish between good and bad deflations. In the former case, falling prices may be caused by aggregate supply (possibly driven by technology advances) increasing more rapidly than aggregate demand. In the latter case, declines in aggregate demand outpace any expansion in aggregate supply....

During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange-rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the...

The creation of EMU and the ECB has triggered a discussion of the future of EMU. Independent observers have pointed to a number of shortcomings or hazard areas' in the construction of EMU, such as the absence of a central lender of last resort function for EMU, the lack of a central authority...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature exploring the “dark side” of social capital, examining the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. We collect new data on the density of associations in 229 German...