This paper deals with foreign exchange rates in Sweden 1658-1803. Foreign currencies played a crucial role in Sweden. Most of the domestic currency units were, in fact, originally imported. In the 18th century, the exchange rates most quoted in Sweden were the ones on Amsterdam, Hamburg, London,...

Coinage debasements were a prevalent and generally very harmful feature of most economies in late-medieval western Europe, and most certainly in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482). Flanders also experienced several economic recessions or contractions from three related sources: warfare; the...

First established during the 1830's, the Enskilda banks were characterized by unlimited owner liability and the right to issue bank notes. Consequently, in Swedish banking history, these banks have been considered to be primitive relics. This paper utilizes new data to revise this picture of the...

The institutionalisation of political economy, this is, the processes through which political economy turned into a scholarly discipline, has become a field of increasing interest in the realm of the history of economic thought. The analysis of the evolution of these processes has been made...

Lira convertibility in the 19th century was mainly advocated due to the need to attract foreign capital, to avoid the temptation of monetizing the huge state debt, to keep the state budget under control and to limit the uncertainties in trade settlements with Italy's main partners, which were...

This article deals with the evolution of the Italian economy in the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century with particular emphasis on money and banking. It also deals with the problem of the huge Italian public debt. In this context it examines the...

La période 1861-1896 est particulièrement mouvementée en Italie relativement à l'évolution du système financier, avec la sortie de l'étalon or (1866), les successions des régimes rélementaires des banques d'émission (1861-66, 1866-74, 1874-81, 1881-93), les crises boursières (1872-73,...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

In this paper we present a new method for estimating market integration under a commodity money system such as that which existed in Europe until the demise of the gold standard. The approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which under conditions of a...

This paper analyzes the Spanish monetary system from 1856, when the Bank of Spain was created, to 1874, when it was awarded the monopoly of emission. This period was characterized by the emergence of an unregulated banking system, with multiple banks of issue entitled to emit bank notes. We...