The Big Problem of Small Change offers the first credible and analytically sound explanation of how a problem that dogged monetary authorities for hundreds of years was finally solved. Two leading economists, Thomas Sargent and François Velde, examine the evolution of Western European economies...

The author proposes an alternative measure of inflation that captures the intuition behind the use of quot;corequot; measures. Inflation is modeled as an unobserved factor affecting the components of an aggregate price index (including food and energy). The common component, estimated using...

I jointly use daily data on deaths and public transportation ridership in San Francisco in 1918–19 to estimate a model in which agents choose their level of economic activity based on perceived infection risk, modeled as a function of current and lagged infections or deaths. Agents’ choices...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

Debates about the nature and economic role of money are mostly informed by evidence from the 20th century, but money has existed for millennia. We argue that there are many lessons to be learned from monetary history that are relevant for current topics of policy relevance. The past acts as a...

Milton Friedman's (1990) counterfactual analysis of what would have happened if the United States had not abandoned bimetallism in 1873 is revisited in a general equilibrium model of bimetallism. I find that bimetallism would have survived and the gold-silver ratio would have remained stable for...