Over the early modern period and beyond, massive amounts of silver and gold were found and mined in the Americas. In this paper, I review the consequences for the European economies. Some second-order receiver countries such as England benefited in both the short and long run. First-order...

The quest for precious metals and trade routes during the early modern period fundamentally changed the world. What was the global impact of the large deposits of silver and gold which existed in the Americas? In this chapter, we take a global view. We find that in Europe, England and the...

We estimate the contribution of the American precious metal windfall to West Europe's growth performance in the early modern period. The exogenous nature of American money arrivals allows for identification of monetary effects. We find that more than half of West Europe's growth can be...

We study the effect of the discovery of precious metals in America on international trade from 1500 to 1810. Around 1500, there was a simultaneous discovery of precious metals and new trading routes. We construct a counterfactual scenario of new routes but no precious metals. The discovery of...

We provide a blueprint for the construction of historical state capacity measures for premodern states, which has several advantages over the state of the art. First, we argue that nominal GDP is the best deflator for state revenues. Second, expenditure patterns have to be considered in order to...

In this note we show that the claim from Chen et al (2005) that their model generates an endogenous markup is incorrect. This is not only a nomenclature issue: using the �fixed markup which we show to be the only one consistent with the structure of the model implies the main conclusions in...

The purpose of this paper is to give an empirical answer to two related but different questions: First, are economic growth and business cycles interdependent? Second, is money neutral even in the long run? Using data from the United States, this paper finds (using a VAR model) and presents...

While research on the history of economics can be important to modern economics, the work of historians of economics is more often than reasonable associated with either non-contemporary or heterodox issues. I provide quantitative evidence of this, by analyzing the publications in the three main...

What was the contribution of intercontinental trade to the development of the European early modern economies? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on static measures of the weight of trade in the aggregate economy at a given point in time, or on the comparison of the income of...

The Taylor hypothesis is the conjecture that the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2008-present downturn have been caused by loose monetary policy during 2002-2006. According to the Taylor hypothesis the Fed deviated from well-know rules of monetary policy-making over this period, and this...