This paper tests whether and how political regimes influenced the cost of public borrowing by comparatively and quantitatively examining a newly compiled dataset on public annuities in early modern Italy. The analysis finds that overall political regimes mattered a lot, but there were important...

This paper reviews recent revisionist studies of imperialism that demonstrate the complexities behind the late Qing state's strategy to accommodate to new challenges born out of foreign conflicts exacerbated by domestic crises. These publications have pointed scholars away from the exclusivity...

The paper examines the structural and organisational problems of social insurance systems in Brazil and the Argentine in order to illuminate current debates about pension ‘reform’. Much of the present discussion depicts social insurance ‘crisis’ as a modern phenomenon. Similarly,...

The prominent role of monetary policy in the U.S. interwar depression has been conventional wisdom since Friedman and Schwartz (1963). This paper presents evidence on both the surprise and the systematic components of monetary policy between 1929 and 1933. Doubts surrounding GDP estimates for...

In England, across the whole period of the Great Debasement, the mint issued six different kinds of silver coins and three kinds of gold coins. According to Gresham’s Law, coins with the same face value but different intrinsic values can not circulate side by side for too long: only those...

This paper revisits the question of debasement by analysing a newly compiled dataset with a novel approach, as well as employing conventional methods. It finds that mercantile influence on monetary policies favoured relative stability, and wage-payers did not typically gain from silver...