Using 1708-1788 historical data, we test the Austrian hypothesis that fractional-reserve banking destabilizes commodity prices, complicating economic calculation and entrepreneurial planning, and contributes to boom-bust cycles. The Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank, 1609-1819) maintained high...

Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

In questo lavoro utilizziamo i nuovi dati storici di contabilità nazionale per l'Italia nel periodo 1861-2010, ricostruiti dalla Banca d'Italia e dall'Istat, con la collaborazione dell'Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata.” La prima parte consiste in uno studio dettagliato delle...

Expected inflation is a central variable in economic theory. Economic historians have estimated historical inflation expectations for a variety of purposes, including studies of the Fisher effect, the debt deflation hypothesis, central bank credibility, and expectations formation. I survey the...

In this paper, we add new evidence to a long-debated macroeconomic question, namely whether money growth has predictive power for inflation or, put differently, whether money growth Granger causes inflation. We use a historical dataset - consisting of annual Swedish data on money growth and...

This paper studies the importance of money for inflation in the euro area. An inflation equation is derived from a small model that combines the supply and demand for money with a Phillips curve and the assumption that inflation expectations develop adaptively. The model's solution attributes an...

Following Driscoll and Holden (2004), I model forward-looking workers who consider it unfair if a wage adjustment fails to match past inflation. However, the present paper proposes a much larger effect by using the job finding rate as the measure of workers' opportunities outside the firm rather...

The last decades have shown a tendency towards higher central bank transparency. It became customary for central bankers to explain their monetary policy decisions in detail and for them to publish inflation forecasts. This leads to the question of how central bank transparency is entangled with...

In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation...

I create a model where interest rates are rigid, but aggregate prices are flexible. As a result, changes in real interest rates lead to changes to inflation in the opposite direction. I conclude that this is how credit crunches and monetary tightening reduce inflation. I simulate different...