This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing...

The paper investigates the role of speculation in the Liverpool cotton futures market between 1921 and 1929. The analysis is based on historical descriptions of the working of speculation in commodity markets and is related to the tenets of behavioural finance. The model posits the existence of...

We use the Bazacle company of Toulouse's unique historical experience as a laboratory to test asset pricing theory. The Bazacle company is the earliest documented shareholding corporation. Founded in 1372 and nationalized in 1946, it was a grain milling firm for most of its 600 year history. We...

Drawing on a new data set of monthly observations, this paper investigates similarities and differences in the discount rate policy of 12 European countries under the Classical Gold Standard. It asks, in particular, whether the bank rate policy followed different patterns in core and peripheral...

This paper is a critique of Michael Postan's famous Malthusian-Ricardo model demonstrating that late-medieval prices and wages were essentially determined by demographic factors, especially after the Black Death, while contending that monetary factors played no role in determining prices or...

This study analyses the impact of Protestantism on interest rates in England from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. One of many myths about the usury doctrine - the prohibition against demanding anything above the principal in a loan (mutuum) - is that it ceased to be observed in...

This article analyses the stability of bimetallism in the mid-18th century for the case of two large centres that had different legal ratios and only one international market ratio. A new theoretical framework is articulated for the situation of international independence to set legal bimetallic...

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)....

Coinage debasement in medieval and early modern Europe remains an ill-understood topic; and indeed an often cited article ("The Debasement Puzzle": Velde and Weber, 1996) sought to demonstrate that coinage debasements were both impractical and economically futile. The purpose of this study is to...

Revisionist estimates of growth rates during the British industrial revolution, though largely successful in presenting a more modest picture of Britain's ‘take-off’ prior to the 1830s, have also posed fresh analytical difficulties for champions of the new economic history. If...