Across Europe and the Americas, the Enlightenment brought intellectual and institutional tumult over that most basic attribute of the political economy – its medium. By the time the age was over, money operated according to a new design. It enabled a set of financial practices that were...

This paper examines interest-parity conditions that arguably held as regards the investment demand for bills of exchange during the classical gold standard (1880–1914). Contemporaneous guides to the foreign exchanges report that close connections between the exchange and discount rates arose...

Swedish abstract: De medeltida brakteaterna är de tunnaste mynt som någonsin har präglats. Trots fragiliteten så dominerade brakteaterna myntväsendet i stora delar av centrala, östra och norra Europa under nästan 200 år. Syftet med denna artikel är att sätta brakteaterna i ett...

Swedish abstract: En vanlig metod att beskatta handel och befolkning under medeltiden var genom periodiska myntindragningar. Denna beskattningsmetod tillämpades i stora delar av Europa under 150−200 år. Gamla mynttyper förklarades ogiltiga och skulle växlas in mot en ny typ till en i...

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)....

Research on the economics and sociology of business networks also sheds light on the development of networks of countries. The British Commonwealth was an important global network, or group of networks, in the mid-twentieth century. Commonwealth members, including Australia and New Zealand,...

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...

This article addresses the question whether the substantial financial flows received by emigration countries contributed to domestic financial development in peripheral Europe before 1914. We quantify a sizable and significant relation between remittances and measures of financial development...

Theoretical and historical experience suggests a financial centre may either include a single, consolidated and loosely regulated stock exchange attracting all intermediaries and actors, or a variety of exchanges going from strictly regulated to completely unregulated and adapted to the needs of...

The three exchange rate regimes adopted by Italy from 1883 up to the eve of World War I - the gold standard (1883-1893), floating rates (1894-1902), and “gold shadowing” (1903-1911) - produced a puzzling result: formal adherence to the gold standard ended in failure while shadowing the gold...