We explore the history of the Austro-Hungarian currency through the floating exchange rate regime of the 1870s and 1880s and the adoption of the gold standard in 1892. Though actual convertibility remained an elusive dream, the A-H Bank was able to stabilise the currency by establishing a...

It has been argued that central bank cooperation was important to the working of the gold standard before 1914. This article takes a critical view of the central bank cooperation thesis and, relying on new archival research as well as on secondary sources, offers an alternative picture of...

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...

The collapse of Overend Gurney and the ensuing Crisis of 1866 was a turning point in British financial history. The achievement of relative stability was due to the Bank of England’s willingness to offer generous assistance to the market in a crisis, combined with an elaborate system for...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. We analyze agents' expectations using the spread between gold and silver bonds issued by the Indian government. We find that bimetallism was credible until France surprised markets by suspending domestic operation...

This paper offers a theory of conditionality lending in nineteenth-century international capital markets. We argue that ownership of reputation signals by prestigious banks rendered them able and willing to monitor government borrowing. Monitoring was a source of rent, and it led bankers to...

This book studies the so far unexplored operation of the international monetary system that prevailed before the emergence of the international gold standard in 1873. Conventional wisdom has it that the emergence of gold as a global anchor was both an inescapable and desirable evolution, given...

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...