This paper investigates the impact of sovereign defaults on the ability of the corporate sector in emerging nations to finance itself abroad. The hypothesis here is that defaults have a negative spillover effect on the private sector through credit rationing. We explore a novel dataset covering...

It has been conventionally argued that the gold standard, as a “good housekeeping seal of approval”, provided an easy access to the international financial markets for the peripheral countries during the classical gold standard era. This paper, by relying on the Ottoman case, questions the...

Most of the available literature on economic and monetary history deals with the advanced countries of Western Europe and the United States of America. The monetary and financial history of South-Eastern Europe, however, is still largely unexplored. So far, historical study of the monetary...

Using newly digitized U.S. city-level data on hospitals, we explore how pandemics alter preferences for healthcare. We find that cities with higher levels of mortality during the Great Influenza of 1918-1919 subsequently expanded hospital capacity by more than cities experiencing less influenza...