Between 1914 and 1918 the success of the British war effort was heavily dependent on the horse. Warfare in the early twentieth century employed horses at least as intensively as did the economy in peacetime. As war became more capital-intensive, an increasing burden was placed on the military...

Military expenditure is difficult to define. Major issues are functional versus institutional approaches to defense, indirect and intangible costs and benefits and current versus comprehensive accounting. Authoritative institutions have adopted standard definitions but national governments are...

In the aftermath of World War I, a financial war was fought on the battlegrounds of international organizations and financial diplomacy. While the League of Nations' Economic and Financial Organization tried to ensure the reconstruction of Europe through guaranteed loans and financial reforms,...

This paper constructs annual trade-weighted nominal and real effective exchange rate indices for Denmark covering the period since the introduction of the krone as the Danish currency unit in 1875. Two real effective krone rate indices with respectively wholesale prices and consumer prices used...

We offer a closer look at the frequency distribution of nominal price changes in the foreign exchange markets for a sample of 10 European exchange-rate pairs on the basis of a unique quarterly data set spanning 273 years. Our analysis clearly illustrates the risk of seriously underestimating the...

Most countries in the world use foreign exchange interventions, but measuring the success of the policy is difficult. By using a narrative approach, I identify interventions when the central bank manages to reverse the exchange rate based on pure luck. I separate them from interventions when the...

Few studies on foreign exchange intervention convincingly address the causal effect of intervention on exchange rates. By using a narrative approach, I address a major issue in the literature: the endogeneity of intraday news which influence the exchange rate alongside central bank operations....

I estimate a single factor model of Swiss exchange rates during World War I for five of the primary belligerents: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. At the outbreak of the war these nations suspended convertibility of their currencies into gold with the promise that after the...

Recent studies on real exchange rates advocate the use of long samples in order to reveal the low frequency properties of the processes. The present paper contributes to this strand of the literature by exploiting recently released time series for the drachma/sterling rate for the period...