Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the “Balassa-Samuelson” effect. But looking back fifty years, or more, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is...

Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Measured by the ratio of trade to output, the period 1870-1913 marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization and the period 1914-1939 its death. What caused the boom and bust? We use an augmented gravity model to examine the gold standard, tariffs, and transport costs as determinants...

A major question in the literature on the classical gold standard concerns the efficiency of international arbitrage. Authors have examined efficiency by looking at the spread of the gold points, gold point violations, or the flow of gold, or by tests of various asset market criteria, including...

Argentina’s money and banking system was hit hard by the Great Depression. The banking sector was awash with bad assets that built up in the 1920s. Gold convertibility was suspended in December 1929, even before the crisis seriously damaged the core economies. Commonly, these events are seen...

This paper surveys the evolution of international capital mobility since the late-nineteenth century. It begins with an overview of empirical evidence on the fall and rise of integration in the global capital market. A discussion of institutional developments focuses on the use of capital...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...