By analysing a newly compiled database of exchange rates, this paper finds that Central European financial integration advanced in a cyclical fashion over the fifteenth century. The cycles were associated with changes in the money supply. Long-distance financial integration progressed in...

Previous research has suggested that pegged exchange rates are associated withlower inflation than floating rates. In which direction does the causality run?Using data from a large sample of developing countries from 1984 to 2000, weconfirm that “hard” pegs (currency boards or a shared...

[...]This article demonstrates that the Bank Holiday that beganon March 6, 1933, marked the end of an old regime, and theFireside Chat a week later inaugurated a new one. TheEmergency Banking Act of 1933, passed by Congress onMarch 9—combined with the Federal Reserve’s commitmentto supply...

Monetary policy has traditionally been viewed as theprocess by which a central bank uses its influence overthe supply of money to promote its economic objectives. Forexample, Milton Friedman (1959, p. 24) defined the tools ofmonetary policy to be those “powers that enable the [FederalReserve]...

[...]This paper examines how repo contracting conventionsevolved in the 1980s. In the next section, we consider therevival of repo financing in the 1950s and the contractingconventions associated with that revival. Section 3 describeshow the rising level and volatility of interest rates and...

[...]In this paper, I survey the academic literature onblockholders and corporate control. As with any survey paper,I must be selective. Thus, I focus on empirical research, as Ibelieve that much of what we know about blockholders hascome through empirical investigations as opposed totheoretical...

[...]The overall conclusion drawn from the research presented isthat monetary policy appears to have less of an impact on realactivity than it once had—but the cause of that change remainsan open issue. The conference papers explored threehypotheses en route to that finding. First, the...

This paper studies the joint business cycle dynamics of inflation, money growth, nominal and real interest rates and the velocity of money. I extend and estimate a standard cash and credit monetary model by adding idiosyncratic preference shocks to cash consumption as well as a banking sector....

[...]In our view, this apparently surprising immunity of the U.S.economy to the Asia crisis reflects the fact that the original wayof thinking about the crisis was flawed. First, it focused only ondemand-side channels and ignored the supply side. Second, thedepreciation of the Asian currencies...

In England, across the whole period of the Great Debasement, the mint issued six different kinds of silver coins and three kinds of gold coins. According to Gresham’s Law, coins with the same face value but different intrinsic values can not circulate side by side for too long: only those...