Abstract: In Hayek's early writings on business cycle theory and the Great Depression he argued that business cycle downturns including the steep downturn of 1929-31 were caused by unsustainable elongations of capital structure of the economy resulting from bank-financed investment in excess of...

Before the invention of money (coin, paper, or digital) there was barter trading, a form of exchange without the use of a monetary medium. The evolution of money has kept pace with the evolution of humans. Money was not invented solely for transaction purposes; it was created to quantify wealth...

This paper provides a brief historical journey of central banking in Latin America to shed light on the debate about monetary policy in the post-global financial crisis period. The paper distinguishes three periods in Latin America's central bank history: the early years, when central banks...

Gold holdings with central banks are often considered to play a stabilizing role in times of crisis. This study performs a cross-country panel data analysis of developed and developing countries to determine whether gold holdings of central banks contribute to sovereign creditworthiness. Our...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

I consider whether a rules-based fiat money system can outperform the gold standard in delivering economic stability. I discuss the potential objectives of monetary policy in Section 1 and the means for achieving the objective in Section 2. I turn to questions of political economy in Section 3....

In this paper we analyze the effect of central bank gold holdings on government bonds and exchange rates. We test the hypothesis that gold reserves build trust and thus reduce government bond yields and exchange rate volatility. The econometric analysis of a panel data set comprising a...

Under inflation targeting inflation exhibits negative serial correlation in the United Kingdom, and little or no persistence in Canada, Sweden and New Zealand, and estimates of the indexation parameter in hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curves are either equal to zero, or very low, in all...

The newly established South African Reserve Bank (SARB) was tasked to protect the currency by navigating the interwar gold standard, and, from March 1933, maintaining parity with the Pound Sterling. We find that South Africa's exit from gold secured an unparalleled and rapid recovery from the...

The gold standard began to emerge as a universal monetary system in the late 1870s, and it had spread throughout the world economy by 1900. It was unusual for nations to be off the gold standard, and it meant that they were detached from the international financial community. Spain never joined...