Paper money, when discretionally issued by a government, can be a very powerful political and economic tool. Who invented it and who caused its global diffusion? Scholars are quick to claim the precedence of their home countries without justifying their claims or contesting competing claims. I...

Can tight and centralized financial regulations prevent financial crises? Governments usually respond to financial crises with tightening and centralizing financial regulations. In this paper, we explore the historical parallels between the governmental responses to the financial crises at the...

Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent failures can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The...

We find evidence that the runs on banks and trust companies in the Panic of 1907 were linked to the Bank of England's contractionary monetary policy actions taken in 1906 and 1907 through the medium of copper prices. Results from our VAR models and copper stockpile data support our argument that...

A currency union is when several independent sovereign nations share a common currency. This has been a recurring phenomenon in monetary history. In this article I study the theoretical foundations of such unions, and discuss some important currency unions in history, most notably the case of...

One strand of the economics literature addresses financial deepening as a precursor to economic growth. Another views it as a cause of financial crises. We examine historical data for 17 economies from 1870 to 1929 to distinguish episodes of growth induced by financial deepening from crises...

The US Great Depression was preceded by almost a decade of credit growth. This review paper suggests that the 1920s credit boom went through two phases: one, up to around 1927, when credit grew in concert with money; another one, from around 1928 to 1929, when credit grew faster than money....

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has attracted more attention than it perhaps deserves given that its main empirical claim, that wealth inequality is bound to occur in "capitalist" economies because the rate of return r is greater than the rate of economic growth g (r g), is not rigorously...

The constitutional Dollar was a silver coin. Federal and state paper moneys were unconstitutional, and gold and copper coins were not Dollars. Consequently, notable constitutional originalists claim any Dollar not constructed from silver – including the current widely circulating paper Federal...

In this paper, we consider whether or not inequality forces society to expend more resources on supervision which imposes an extra cost to doing business. Some argue that since inequality deteriorates social capital, there is a greater need for supervisory labor which is a costly burden to bear....