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,...

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 this paper 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...

I decompose Virginia's paper money into expected real-asset present value, risk discount, and transaction premium or “moneyness” value. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts...

Beginning in 1712, North Carolina's assembly emitted its own paper money and maintained some amount of paper money in public circulation for the rest of the colonial period. Yet, data on colonial North Carolina's paper money regime in the current literature are thin and often erroneous. We...

The U.S. Congress issued paper money called Continental Dollars to finance the American Revolution. The story of the Continental Dollar is familiar to all -- a lot were issued and hyper-inflation ensued. However, the details of this story are less well known. Scholars even disagree over how much...

I reconstruct the data on Virginia's paper money regime using forensic accounting techniques. I correct the existing data on the amounts authorized and outstanding. In addition, I reconstruct yearly data on previously unknown aspects of Virginia's paper money regime, including printings, net new...

I use denominational structure (the spacing and size of monetary units) to explain how the Continental Congress attempted to manage a successful common currency when sub-national political entities were allowed to have separate currencies and run independent monetary policies. Congress created a...