[eng] The Maastricht Treaty has emphasised that « convergence » criteria were holy principles for a successful completion of monetary unification. From this respect, the experience of the «classical» gold standard of the late nineteenth century might have interesting lessons for us, because...

[fre] La célébration du cinquantième anniversaire de la création du système de Bretton Woods invite à replacer les évolutions récentes du Système Monétaire Européen dans une perspective historique. Dans le passé, les arrangements monétaires internationaux ont été de trois types. A...

[eng] Common Currency, Decentralization and Inflation : is the « Westphalian Model » relevant ? Marc Flandreau Is there a systematic relation between the organization of the decision making process within a monetary union and the average inflation rate that this union tends to produce ? More...

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Cette publication n'a pas de résumé

Cette publication n'a pas de résumé

This paper provides new evidence on the rise of the dollar as an international currency, focusing on its role in the conduct of trade and the provision of trade credit. We show that the shift to the dollar occurred much earlier than conventionally supposed: during and immediately after World War...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the performance of rating agencies in assessing the risks of sovereign debt, an...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries’ money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the...