Can the central bank of a small open economy be mandated with the maintenance of both fixed exchange rates and monetary independence, and still succeed in the long term? Looking at a pioneering experiment put in place by the National Bank of Belgium, this article shows how foreign exchange...

Can the central bank of a small open economy be mandated with the maintenance of both fixed exchange rates and monetary independence, and still succeed in the long term? Looking at a pioneering experiment put in place by the National Bank of Belgium, this article shows how foreign exchange...

As well as the current one, the wave of globalization culminated in 1913 was marked by increasing accumulation of foreign exchange reserves. But what did ‘reserves' mean in the past, how were they managed, and how much relevant are the differences between then and now? This paper is the first...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of how liquid money market instruments – sterling bills of exchange – were produced during the first globalisation. We rely on a unique data set that reports systematic information on all 23,493 bills re-discounted by the Bank of England in the year...

The impact of fiscal dominance on exchange rates has been relatively overlooked by the literature. We focus on an early unique experiment of freely floating State-issued money, implemented in Venice from 1619 to 1666. Building on a new hand-collected database from a previously unused archival...