Existing estimates of the annual unemployment rate from 1870 to 1913 were constructed by the Board of Trade, initially in 1888, and updated thereafter. This is still the series which is widely used and cited. It is based on records of the number unemployed in various trade unions and it has a...

Die Staatsschuldenkrise einiger Länder in der EWU ist letztlich doch eine Währungskrise. Nur im gemeinsamen Währungsraum war es überhaupt möglich, die Schuldaufnahme stark auszuweiten. Andererseits treten bei Zweifeln an der finanziellen Solidität von Schuldnerstaaten kumulative...

The paper looks at the National Bank of Romania’s issue of banknotes from 1880 through 1914, highlighting the developments in the notes’ cover, the channels whereby the central bank put its notes into circulation, as well as the behaviour of the issuing house during episodes of crisis. The...

The paper studies an idealized gold standard in a two-country setting. Unless national policies for domestic credit expansion (dce) are flexible enough to offset the effect of money demand shocks on international gold reserves, the gold standard collapses with certainty in finite time through a...

Over the past century, the world economy has passed through a succession of phases characterized by very different levels of international capital flows. This paper asks what accounts for these dramatic shifts in the extent of capital movements across national borders. Three categories of...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bond market from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the limited credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914, gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

We study the determinants of the dollar/pound real exchange rate from 1879 to 1914 focusing on the role of fiscal policy. We present a simple dynamic model of the real exchange rate to frame our analysis. The econometric results are based upon the decomposition of the sources of the innovation...