In May-July 1931, a series of financial panics shook Central Europe before spreading to the rest of the world. This paper explores how the 1931 Central European crisis propagated to the London and New York financial centers; it also examines the role of cross-border banking linkages in...

Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its account of the political environment in which the Bank of England operated: in particular it conveys very clearly the attitudes of Margaret Thatcher, her successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, and their officials...

This paper provides new evidence on the decline of sterling as an international currency, focusing on its role as foreign exchange reserve asset under the Bretton Woods era. Using a unique new dataset on the composition of foreign exchange reserves of central banks, I show that the shift away...

This paper re-investigates the implications of monetary policy rules on changes in exchange rate, in a risk-adjusted, uncovered interest parity model with unrestricted parameters, emphasizing the importance of modeling market expectations of monetary policy. I use consensus forecasts as a proxy...

This paper explores the risks and returns to currency speculation during the 1920s and 1930s. We study the performance of two well-known technical trading strategies (carry and momentum) and compare them with that of a fundamentals-based trader: John Maynard Keynes. Technical strategies were...

Central bank lender of last resort (LOLR) regimes are the last line of defence before governments are forced to resort to taxpayer-funded bailouts of the financial system. Yet despite this important role, along with a rich theoretical literature examining the function and design of LOLR regimes,...

We examine whether central banks' voting records help predict the future course of monetary policy in the Czech republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, controlling for financial market expectations. Unlike previous research, first, we examine the period of the global financial...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between market participants' perception of central bank predictability and their assessment of central bank communication skills and success in conveying objectives as well as the importance of transparency-enhancing measures, such as voting records,...