This paper is devoted to currency policies in Austria over the last 200 years, attempting to sketch historical developments and uncover regularities and interconnections with macroeconomic variables. During most of the 200-year period, Austrian currencies were subject to fixed exchange rates, in...

The article treats the history of Germany’s Great Inflation from 1914 to 1923. It focusses on explaining the turning points of wholesale price trends. It demonstrates that these were mostly triggered by national and international political decisions immediately impacting the mark exchange...

Economic history can offer an independent contribution to the analysis of the conditions of success and the mode of action of different types of monetary integration. Up to now, the debate about the functional mechanisms of monetary unions in the real world has ignored the Habsburg Monarchy. The...

I estimate a single factor model of Swiss exchange rates during World War I for five of the primary belligerents: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. At the outbreak of the war these nations suspended convertibility of their currencies into gold with the promise that after the...

The present paper contains a brief presentation and analysis, in a historical perspective through the lens of the recent major crises, of the legal framework governing the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as well as current developments and challenges ahead. It is structured in three...

The past Greek crisis experience is more or less terra incognita. In all historical empirical studies Greece is systematically neglected or included only sporadically in their cross-country samples. In the national literature too there is little on this topic. In this paper we focus on the Greek...

Greece is one of the countries that were dramatically affected by the recent euro crisis, as in six years it lost more than one fourth of its national product. Although its economic and monetary history is rich in crises and defaults, it has not been systematically studied, thus remaining...

A Plan for a European Economic Community was developed at the University of Berlin in 1942. There are striking similarities with the European Economic Community that was introduced in 1957 – and which became the foundation stone of the European Union. Particularly striking is the innate...

Neither history nor economic historians have been kind to Greece’s central bank in the interwar years. Born at the behest of the League of Nations to help the country secure a new international loan, the Bank of Greece was treated with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. The onset of the...

This paper analyses the early years of the history of the Bundesbank from a history of economic thought-perspective. The study uses the example of Bernhard Benning, who was heading the Economics Department of the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft, one major banks owned by the German Reich during the...