In this paper we argue that, for a group of converging economies of the European Union, participation in the euro area has been associated with easier access to financing by domestic economic agents. Easier access to financing was a significant impulse leading to a sharp increase in households'...

In this paper I combine long multi-country time series data for interest rates and stock returns with the institutional evidence for much earlier centuries amassed by economic historians to study the question of financial globalization and how it has altered since the late classical era. At...

In this paper we examine the stability of the real exchange rate and the macroeconomic effects of alternative exchange-rate regimes, including currency union, on real exchange-rate behaviour. We focus on the Irish punt in order to exploit its diversity of experience over different nominal...

Using long-span data on the dollar-sterling and dollar-franc real exchange rates over the past two centuries, we apply the findings of various strands of the recent literature in order to examine the statistical and economic significance of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect (the effect of...

We study the validity of uncovered interest-rate parity (UIP) by constructing ultra long time series that span two centuries. The forward-premium regressions yield positive slope estimates over the whole sample period and become negative only when the sample is dominated by the period of 1980s....

Every once in a great while, history provides us with a natural experiment, an episode in which a major change in a key economic variable occurs that has no direct relation to the contemporaneous behavior of the variables that theory suggests it ought to effect.1 A classic example was the...

This paper compares the behavior of real interest rate differentials across the major countries under the Bretton Woods regime and the regime of floating exchanges that replaced it. The primary object is to investigate both the extent of market integration and its changes over time. For all...