The Bretton Woods agreements set up the post-war monetary order on the basis of fixed exchange rates and autonomous national economic policy. Changes in parity were allowed in the case of fundamental disequilibrium, but this concept was not defined, promoting a lengthy but sterile debate. This...

The three exchange rate regimes adopted by Italy from 1883 up to the eve of World War I — the gold standard (1883-1893), floating rates (1894-1902), and “gold shadowing” (1903-1911) — produced a puzzling result: formal adherence to the gold standard ended in failure while shadowing the...

Since the mid-1950s the spread of formal models and econometric method has greatly improved the study of the past, giving rise to the 'new' economic history; at the same time, the influence of economic history on economists and economics has markedly declined. This paper argues that the...

In this paper, recent contributions to the legal restrictions theory of money are critically examined from the perspective of received monetary economics. In particular, it is shown that, contrary to some interpretations, M. Friedman's work on the optimum quantity of money does not support the...

Classical economists developed a surprisingly sophisticated analysis of money supply variations that, anticipating the main features of contemporary theory, emphasizes the role of information in the transmission mechanism. Drawing on the classical contributions, this paper outlines a general...

The standard approach to optimum currency areas clashes with both modern monetary theory and empirical evidence. The present paper sets forth an equilibrium hypothesis that views the national border as the analogue of a policy measure impinging on agents' optimizing behavior. Copyright Kluwer...