In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Scotland had a stable financial system. Its stability arose from the pressure that private banks, which had the right to issue bank notes, placed on each other to behave prudently. Unlike in England, the Scottish banking system had no central...

Current debates on austerity often forget that these policies are almost 100 years old .This paper explores how the combination of austerity and technocracy acted as a powerful tool to secure the compliance of European countries to socio-economic stabilization after WWI. Austerity emerged as an...

The literature on the growth effects of European integration remains inconclusive. This is due to severe methodological difficulties mostly driven by country heterogeneity. This paper addresses these concerns using the synthetic control method. It constructs counterfactuals for countries that...

I use the global crisis of 1914 as a window onto the phenomenon of investor reaction to complex news — such as sudden political upheaval. Based on a novel database of all stocks traded on the NYSE during 1914, along with “real-time” news accounts from major newspapers, I show that NYSE...

1989 was described as lsquo;annus mirabilis', and its revolutions hailed as one of the great moments in human history. In subsequent years, the re-emergence of war, genocide and terror led to re-interpretation: Europe became a dark continent, the 20th century its darkest hour. Was 1989 merely a...

Art is often presented as an investment of last resort or a potential safe haven in times of political or financial distress. Yet, as no study has focused on the performance of art markets in times of crisis, this paper fills this gap by means of unclosing historical auction archives. We trace...

This paper describes the monetary policy response of countries during the inter-war period. How did central banks react to the Great Depression? How did countries balance the externals demands of the gold standard with domestic policy pressures? What was the optimal level of international policy...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

Current theories of financial regulation suggest expanding rules-based formal state intervention to promote international banking stability. Such policy solutions should then be global in scope. This article instead argues that principles-based informal co- and self-regulation through domestic...