The central bank’s possibility to sustain the specie standard was largely affected by both the financial development and its internationalization. The increased foreign debt denominated in foreign currencies forced the central bank to engage in more disciplinary monetary policy. The developed...

Recently a number of studies on banking systems’ procyclicality have been drawn. Such an issue, often developed as a consequence of Basel 2 agreements, is related with credit crunch phenomena and financial stability. Typically, a temporary shock may produce a long term effect following or...

We develop a parsimonious finance and endogenous growth model with microeconomic frictions in entrepreneurship and a role for credit constraints. We demonstrate that though an efficiency-growth relation will always exist, the efficiency-depth-growth relation may not. This has implications for...

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...

While most continental European economies have exhibit deceiving outcomes for two decades, it seems necessary ? and it reveals fruitful ? to elaborate an « institutional hypothesis » to understand this failure. Our central reasoning is the following : it is in the absence or the muffling of...

The medieval system of payment in Sweden was complex. This paper aims at clarifying some essential features of it in a way that may facilitate further study of medieval Swedish economic history by international researchers. For instance, the presentation of the exchange rate between the silver...

This paper classifies the monetary standards in Sweden from the Middle Ages to the present, and gives an overview of the various currencies that were in use. During most of Sweden’s history, a commodity standard was in place, while the fiat standard is a rather late innovation. The...

This paper seeks to answer two questions: were the coinage debasements in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482) undertaken principally as monetary or fiscal policies; and were they beneficial or harmful? In a recent monograph, Sargent and Velde (Big Problem of Small Change: 2002) contend that monetary...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the...