Maryland’s non-legal-tender paper money emissions between 1765 and 1775 are reconstructed to determine the quantities outstanding and their redemption dates, providing a substantial correction to the literature. Over 80 percent of this paper money’s current market value was expected real...

The spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 are reconstituted using forensic accounting techniques from primary sources. Such has not been done previously for any British North American colony. These data are used to...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand,...

An alternative history of the Continental Dollar is constructed from the original resolutions passed by Congress. The Continental Dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond, not a fiat currency. The public could redeem it at face value in specie at fixed future dates. Being a zero-interest bearer...

Remittances of Continental Dollars to the national treasury from each state by year from 1779 through 1789 are used to determine state compliance with congressional resolutions regarding Continental-Dollar redemption. From 1781 through 1789, the states as a whole stayed well ahead of the...

A new approach to explaining the value of colonial paper money that relies on their distinctive character as bills of credit is presented. The market value of these bills is decomposed into their real asset present value and their liquidity premium value. This approach is applied to the newly...

Forensic accounting is used to reconstruct the data on emissions, redemptions, and bills outstanding for colonial New Jersey paper money. These components are further separated into the amounts initially legislated, and the amounts actually executed. These data are substantial improvements over...

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to convince the reader that the Continental dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond and not a fiat currency—thereby overturning 230 years of scholarly interpretation; to show that the public and leading Americans knew and acted on this fact, and to illustrate the...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislative-issued fiat paper monies as their principal internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. It was monetary experimentation on a grand scale. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged...

The purported failure of the classical quantity theory of money in the colonial economy is shown to be a failure of data and not a failure of theory. When new data on the quantity of specie in circulation is added to the current data on paper money and prices, and econometrically estimated in...