This paper pursues the comparison of economic integration today and pre 1914 for trade as well as finance, primarily for the United States but also with reference to the wider world. We establish the outlines of international integration a century ago and analyze the institutional and...

The connections between globalization and democracy are a classic question in international political economy and a topic much debated in foreign policy circles. While the analytical literature is extensive, few previous studies have acknowledged the possibility of bidirectional causality or...

Using panel data and case studies, we analyze the pre-1970 history of international capital flows and current account reversals. Considering a sample of emerging markets and advanced economies with per capita GDPs at least 60 per cent those of the lead country, we show that the incidence of...

Recent research in international economic history has opened up new lines of enquiry on the origins of globalization, as well as its causes and consequences. Such findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates and this paper considers what lessons this body of historical work has for...

Measured by the ratio of trade to output, the period 1870 1913 marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization and the period 1914 39 its death. What caused the boom and bust? We use an augmented gravity model to examine the gold standard, tariffs, and transport costs as determinants of...

Recent globalization trends have refocused attention on the historical evolution of international capital mobility over the long run. The issue is examined here using time-series analysis of current-account dynamics for fifteen countries since circa 1850. The inter-war period emerges as an era...

The ebb and flow of international capital since the nineteenth century illustrates recurring difficulties, as well as the alternative perspectives from which policymakers have tried to confront them. This paper is devoted to documenting these vicissitudes quantitatively and explaining them....

We consider the operation of international capital markets in two periods of globalization, before 1914 and after 1971, with a focus on the crisis problem. We explore the idea that the incidence of crises in these two periods reflects how capital flows were embedded in the larger economic...

In broad perspective, there have been essentially two competing views of the global financial crisis, albeit there are some complementarities among them. One view looks across the border: it mainly blames external imbalances, the large-scale mix of unprecedented pattern current account deficits...

We examine whether the behavior of current account balances changed in the years preceding the global crisis of 2008-09, and assess the prospects for global imbalances in the post-crisis period. Changes in the budget balance are an important factor affecting current account balances for deficit...