From the dawn of coined money to just a few decades ago, the monetary system had been linked, directly or indirectly, to a commodity. The age-long dominance of metallism is puzzling because the conventional character of money, or cartalist theory, had already been grasped in the earliest...

This paper contrasts the received view of optimum currency areas with the modernequilibrium approach. Setting Mundell's work against earlier analyses of monetary unions exposes the peculiarities of his theory, embedded in the static Keynesian paradigm. Mundell's hypothesis, constructed on the...

Since the mid-1990s new developments in the theory of optimum currency areashave set forth an equilibrium approach that, in contrast with the traditional viewstemming from Robert Mundell's seminal paper, considers the optimality criteria as the product of equilibrium forces and therefore...

This paper contrasts the received view of optimum currency areas with the modernequilibrium approach. Setting Mundell's work against earlier analyses of monetary unions exposes the peculiarities of his theory, embedded in the static Keynesian paradigm. Mundell's hypothesis, constructed on 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...