This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

Archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic re-coinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or...

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694 the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralized British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in...

Economic history can offer an independent contribution to the analysis of the conditions of success and the mode of action of different types of monetary integration. Up to now, the debate about the functional mechanisms of monetary unions in the real world has ignored the Habsburg Monarchy. The...

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...

At the beginning of the 18th century, Sweden was an imperial power that had just sustained a century of modest economic growth. In 1800, Sweden's empire was gone, after a series of military defeats. Real GDP per capita had fallen to the same level as the early 1600s. In other words, the 18th...

The Latin Monetary Union (hereafter LMU) was established in 1865 between France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. The agreement provided for the adoption of a common monetary base consisting of specie, and the adoption of the free circulation of gold and silver coins among them, whatever the...

This paper studies the microfoundations of the so-called “gold device” policy by analysing a new dataset on the Bank of England’s operations in the gold market at the heyday of the classical gold standard. It explains that “gold devices” must be understood in connection to the Bank’s...

In the first thirty years of its operations, key functions of the privileged National Bank of the Kingdom of Serbia (1884-1914) were those of a creditor of the economy, issuer of currency and banker to the government. The National Bank’s success in the performance of its functions was mainly...

The paper explores the similiraties and differences between the origin, behavior and evolution of the central banks of Portugal and Spain. Portugal and Spain are two countries that share the same peninsular space in the west corner of Europe. Though different in size and population, the...