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...

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...

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...

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...

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694 the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralized British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in...

How did the Spanish money supply evolve in the aftermath of the discovery of large amounts of precious metals in Spanish America? We synthesize the available data on the mining of precious metals and their international flow to estimate the money supply for Spain from 1492 to 1810. Our estimate...

I provide the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history. I propose two main estimation methods. The first, which I call the 'direct method', is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only....

The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 suspended the convertibility of the Bank of England's notes into gold. The current historical consensus is that the suspension was a result of the state's need to finance the war, France's remonetization, a loss of confidence in the English country banks, and a...

PhD dissertation summary forthcoming at: European Review of Economic History

Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait of early modern England. This growth pattern was...