Canada, like many countries, has recently experienced difficulties in achieving money growth stability and money supply independence. Based on the buffer-stock view of money-holding as well as the credit market approach to the money supply, this paper suggests that the problems have arisen from...

This paper tests the hypothesis that idiosyncratic U.S. disturbances and their international propagation can account for the global Depression. Exploiting common stochastic trends in U.S. and Canadian interwar data, we estimate a small open economy model for Canada that decomposes output...

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any...

We review the conduct and scale of official intervention by monetary authorities in the U.S.A., Japan, and West Germany since the Plaza Agreement. Relative to trading volume and the stock of internationally traded assets denominated in foreign currencies, intervention is small--scale and...

Three possible explanations for the emergence of the Canadian central bank in 1935 are examined: that it reflected the need of competitive banking systems for a lender of the last resort; that it was necessary to anchor the unregulated Canadian monetary system after the abandonment of the gold...

This paper presents an overview of the Bretton Woods experience. From an historical perspective. I analyze its performance relative to other international monetary regimes. its origins. its operation. its problems and its demise. In the survey I emphasize both issues deemed important at the time...

This paper provides evidence and an explanation for an empirical regularity in the income velocity of money. Based on a cross country comparison in the post World War II period of 84 countries arrayed from very low to very high per capita income, velocity displays a U shaped pattern. This...

This paper pursues the comparison of economic integration today and pre 1914 for trade as well as finance, primarily for the United States but also with reference to the wider world. We establish the outlines of international integration a century ago and analyze the institutional and...

This paper considers the meaning of domestic and international systemic risk. It examines scenarios that have been adduced as creating systemic risk both within countries and among them. It distinguishes between the concepts of real and pseudo-systemic risk. We examine the history of episodes...

The specie standard that prevailed before 1914 was a contingent rule. Under the rule specie convertibiltity could be suspended in the event of a well understood, exogenously produced emergency, such as a war, on the understanding that after the emergency had safely passed convertibility would be...