The high level of trade and financial integration reached by Europe both today and under the late 19th century gold standard suggests that important lessons can be learned by looking at past record to inform current issues. In this article, we draw a fresh picture of the European gold standard,...

In this paper we consider a regime where several target zones coexist. Parities are defended by manipulating money supplies in participating countries. As a result, interventions aimed at one given exchange rate influence other exchange rates as well. Such ‘externalities’ are shown to have...

This paper examines the historical record of the Austro-Hungarian monetary union, focusing on its bargaining dimension. As a result of the 1867 Compromise, Austria and Hungary shared a common currency, although they were fiscally sovereign and independent entities. By using repeated threats to...

How does sovereign debt emerge and become sustainable? This paper provides a new answer to this unsolved puzzle. Focusing on the early 19th century, we argue that intermediaries' market power served to overcome information asymmetries and sustained the development of sovereign debt. Relying on...

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical...

In this article, we use the original ledgers of the Bank of England to document which institutions received liquidity during the crisis of 1866. The so-called Overend-Gurney panic is when the Bank began adopting lending of last resort policies (Bignon, Flandreau and Ugolini 2011). We compare...

In this paper we chart the geography of the gold standard. We highlight the late date of the move to gold and the variety of transition strategies. Whether a country with a currency convertible into specie operated a gold, silver or bimetallic standard at mid-century depended not so much on...

This paper develops a new insight enabling the empirical study of media capture: minority shareholders of newspapers and readers face similar risks. Both are adversely affected when corrupt insiders use the newspaper for personal profit and receive invisible revenues. This means that relevant...

This paper is an exploration of the theory of endogenous regime changes which takes as an illustration the making of the classical gold standard. The international gold-based fixed exchange rate regime that surfaced during the 1870s has traditionally been interpreted as resulting from a mix of...

Ferguson and Schularick (2006) recently provided a measure of the effect of Empire subjection on borrowing countries’ interest rates. They find this effect to be large and significant, ranging between 80 to 180 basis points. We argue that their methodology is inadequate and that their...