This article reviews the first English edition of Prof. Jesús Huerta de Soto´s book `Dinero, Crédito Bancario y Ciclos Económicos´ which first appeared in Spain in 1998.

What is the role of foreign currency debt in precipitating financial crises? In this paper we compare the 1880 to 1913 period to recent experience. We examine debt crises, currency crises, banking crises and the interrelation between these varieties of crises. We pay special attention to the...

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 divided Mississippi between the 6th (Atlanta) and 8th (St. Louis) Federal Reserve Districts. Before and during the Great Depression, these districts' policies differed. The Atlanta Fed championed monetary activism and the extension of credit to troubled banks. The...

Bank failures during banking crises, in theory, can result either from unwarranted depositor withdrawals during events characterized by contagion or panic, or as the result of fundamental bank insolvency. Various views of contagion are described and compared to historical evidence from banking...

The capital structure of firms is known to be different not only due to firm characteristics but also to the sources of capital. Therefore, there is a need to understand the supply side effects on a firm´s capital structure. A small firm´s choice of financing sources may be limited by the...

After the Second World War, as the Assemblea Costituente was drafting the new republican Constitution, an intense debate took place among its members as to what model to adopt for the Italian economy. A special Commission, the "Credit Commission", was set up to revise the 1936 banking law,...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

The basic thesis is that the modern 'financial revolution', usually dated to eighteenth century England, but far more properly to the sixteenth-century Netherlands, in terms of those institutions for both government finance (borrowing) and international finance (bills of exchange), owed its...

This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a...