This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-art research in the field of monetary history. The authors comprise a collection of leading academics from universities worldwide. Thanks to its unrivaled breadth both in time (from antiquity to the present) and geographical...

Primitive and Non-metallic Money -- Monetary System of Ancient Asia: China -- Monetary System of the Ancient Regime -- Medieval Debasement and Seigniorage -- Gresham's Law -- Flows of Precious Metals and Prices in Europe -- Rise and Decline of the Global Silver Standard -- Money, Trade, and...

In the second half of the 20th century, Spain provides a case of political regime change, which according to some political economy models should also lead to a shift in the cyclical nature of fiscal policy. We find that in most of the pre-democratic era, there was a strong procyclical bias to...

What determined the multinational expansion of European banks in the pre1914 era of globalization? And how were banks’ foreign investments related to other facets of the globalizing world economy such as trade and capital flows? The paper reviews both the contemporary and historical...

After significant headway towards liberalization of capital movements in the early 1960s, European governments resorted massively to capital controls in the turmoil of the demise of the Bretton Woods system. In some countries (Italy among others), what looked like a temporary backlash against...