When faced with a run on a "systemically important" but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate...

While a great power in the eighteenth century, France fell behind Britain's lead in modernizing her macroeconomic institutions. This paper examines the development of French macroeconomic institutions from the middle ages to the eighteenth century in a comparative framework. Theories of optimal...

Reparations as an instrument of international peace settlements were abandoned after the failure of Germany to pay its post World War I indemnity. However, reparations played a useful role in the construction of earlier peace treaties. This paper examines the payment of reparations by the French...

An 1890s loan book of the Bank A. Levy permits a detailed examination of the lending operations of a private bank in California during the National Banking Era (1864-1914). This period has been intensively analyzed at the macroeconomic level, but there are few microeconomic studies of banks....

Contemporary bank governance is criticized for manager-dominated (insider) boards of directors, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century, bank presidents appear also to have operated as chairmen of the boards of directors. However, the managers were constrained by a variety of rules that...

We reinterpret the commonly held view in the U.S. that France, by following a policy from 1965 to 1968 of deliberately converting their dollar holdings into gold helped perpetuate the collapse of the Bretton Woods International Monetary System. We argue that French international monetary policy...

Contemporary observers viewed the recession that began in the summer of 1929 as nothing extraordinary. Recent analyses have shown that the subsequent large deflation was econometrically forecastable, implying that a driving force in the depression was the high expected real interest rates faced...

The establishment of a centralized government bureaucracy to collect taxes is regarded as one of the essential features of a modern economy. Britain has long been regarded as a pioneer, creating an efficient tax-collecting bureaucracy over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the other...