The project of a national register of wool was the fever dream of mercantilism in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. For more than half a century, major parts of the English woolen traders and clothiers thereby attempted to lend administrative teeth to the ban on the exportation of...

The pivotal role played by non-banking institutions in supporting the expansion of international trade after the Napoleonic Wars and before first globalization c. 1870 - 1913 has long been recognised. Merchant-bankers in particular played a crucial role by advancing monies to consignors of...

In this paper, we mainly focus on two institutional aspects that are related to financial risk, that is, profiteering and the use of non-fraudulent coins when performing financial transactions. We argue that these two prerequisites were important for the success of the commercially oriented...

This paper examines interest-parity conditions that arguably held as regards the investment demand for bills of exchange during the classical gold standard (1880-1914). Contemporaneous guides to the foreign exchanges report that close connections between the exchange and discount rates arose...

By analyzing the case of Athens during the Classical period (508-323 BCE) the main thesis of this paper is that under direct democracy procedures and the related institutional setup, a monetary system without a Central Bank may function relatively well. We focus on the following issues: (i) The...

Max Weber's path to economic science was impacted to a large degree by political motives. The question emerges how the depiction, which has been maintained by historians of economics, of Weber as a methodologist – who demands objectivity and value freedom in scientific analysis – is...

Aim: The main objective of the paper was to calculate social savings (and consumer surplus) of innovation on the example of railroads in Germany for 1985. The railways were among the most important innovations in the nineteenth century. Being aware of the limits of the social savings technique,...

It is not wrong said that monasteries and churches were one of the elements that led to the development of human settlements in Iasi, especially the city of Iasi. Most churches/monasteries from the feudal period, received from princes / noblemen vast areas of land in order to develop...

This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. Digitizing over 5000 rental advertisements, we construct a state-of-the-art index – the first pre-war and pre-Soviet market data index for any Russian city. In...

This special issue of the International Review of Economics and Finance contributes to the received literature of the dynamics of international migration by highlighting the role of tradition in propelling migration; by admitting that the human capital formation response to the prospect of...