This article provides a descriptive overview of the payment card industry in Europe and compares the various forms of organization of payment card systems in European countries. This synthesis helps to understand the paradoxes and the challenges entailed in the creation of the Single Euro...

Recent literature has advanced the view that the Gibson paradox, or the positive correlation of the price level with nominal interest rates, is nearly always a gold standard phenomenon. We argue that the Gibson correlation is more accurately classified as a statistical artifact of commodity...

We aim at characterizing the Classical Gold Standard period (CGS) in order to verify if it is endowed with statistical regularity. We study the statistical properties of two-state annual transition matrices of countries switching from a sound state to a crisis state focusing on Reinhart and...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, and after decades of relative neglect, the importance of the financial system and its episodic crises as drivers of macroeconomic outcomes has attracted fresh scrutiny from academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Theoretical advances are following a...

The gold standard began to emerge as a universal monetary system in the late 1870s, and it had spread throughout the world economy by 1900. It was unusual for nations to be off the gold standard, and it meant that they were detached from the international financial community. Spain never joined...

The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers’ certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

Dollarisation, EMU or the question of central banks' independence raise questions centered on the privilege of minting money. In this perspective, it seems important to study Neochartalism, in so far as it extends the analysis initiated by Knapp, and investigates specifically the links between...

Centralized exchange has a worst-case size-complexity many orders of magnitude lower than decentralized monetary exchange. As long as its computational limits are not exceeded, therefore, a centralized exchange may approach Pareto-efficiency more rapidly than a decentralized exchange. Wealth...

What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And what are the mechanics of a debasement? To analyze these questions, we develop a model of commodity money with light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with...

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims at elucidating what can be called the nature of money. To define it, we first distinguish between the generic properties of every money and its different and non specifically monetary uses. Then currency is grasped through its three...