This article deals with the evolution of the Italian economy in the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century with particular emphasis on money and banking. It also deals with the problem of the huge Italian public debt. In this context it examines the...

There are mainly two types of theories explaining banking crisis, emanating from the monetarist school respectively institutional economics. Using an allegory, monetarists are discussing how much water in terms of liquidity that is needed to stop a fire escalating into a disaster, while...

Currently, foreign banks own the banks that hold about 80 percent of the assets in Mexican banks. The paper argues that this is the third instance in which foreign-owned banks have initially comprised a large part of the Mexican banking system, and that in the first two cases (1865-1910 and...

How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes; (ii) why after 1600 both England and France moved from competitive methods for collecting revenues to allocating the right to...

This article reviews the first English edition of Prof. Jesús Huerta de Soto´s book `Dinero, Crédito Bancario y Ciclos Económicos´ which first appeared in Spain in 1998.

Historical ‘bubbles’ are often attributed to mispricing, but the empirical analysis of such episodes has been limited. This paper examines a notable but academically neglected period, known as the British Railway Mania, using a new dataset and a cross-sectional methodology which is unique to...

This study wanted to pinpoint the different securities transactions’ channels in France, which are quite specific compared to other countries.As a matter of fact, the Paris Bourse could not be well explained without the free market and the deposit banks'transactions. This organisation leads to...

During the British Railway Mania of the 1840s the promotion and construction of new railways increased dramatically. These new projects were generally financed by shares with uncalled capital, which allowed investors to make payments on an instalment basis over a period of several years. There...