The paper looks at the National Bank of Romania’s issue of banknotes from 1880 through 1914, highlighting the developments in the notes’ cover, the channels whereby the central bank put its notes into circulation, as well as the behaviour of the issuing house during episodes of crisis. The...

In the first thirty years of its operations, key functions of the privileged National Bank of the Kingdom of Serbia (1884-1914) were those of a creditor of the economy, issuer of currency and banker to the government. The National Bank’s success in the performance of its functions was mainly...

The early stages of banking and finance in Turkey were one of its brightest periods, even though it was the toughest because of lack of capital and unfavourable initial conditions. The finance and banking conception was quite rational and potential crises were eliminated through careful choices....

This paper studies the dynamics of the bank efficiency in Bulgaria in the years 1923 and 1928. In the course of research several interdependencies were detected, related mainly to the reaction of different types of banks to the financial crisis and the financial stabilization. Official bank...

The Berle-Means thesis (1932) implies that diffuse ownership adversely affects firm performance. This paper tries to investigate whether there is strong evidence to support the notion that variations across firms in observed ownership structures result in systematic variations in observed firm...

Fixed exchange rate regimes can be regarded as a “rule with escape clauses”, allowing the monetary authorities to temporarily suspend convertibility and enact a discretionary policy only under well-understood contingencies, such as wartime emergencies and financial panics. Seen from this...

This paper attempts to provide, for the first time, a survey of the construction of estimates of the quantity of money in Greece since the inception of the National Bank of Greece in 1842 until the eve of WWII. Specifically, we describe in detail the methods of construction and the sources of...

The paper estimates inflation persistence in Greece from 1975 to 2003, a period of high variation in inflation and changes in policy regimes. Three empirical methodologies, univariate autoregressive (AR) modelling, second-generation random coefficient (RC) modelling, and vector autoregressive...

This paper aims to trace the history of central banking in pre-WWII Greece. To this end, we first study the country’s financial structure and its process of financial development. Several indices of financial development have been assessed and their evolvement has been studied. The country’s...

The role of corporations in allocating resources has been of great importance in the debate about the manner in which enterprises should be governed to enhance economic growth. Corporate governance features seem to be central to the dynamics by which successful firms and economies improve their...