The National Monetary Commission was deeply concerned with importing best practice. One important focus was the connection between the money market and international trade. It was said that Britain's lead in the market for “acceptances” originating in international trade was the basis of its...

The French Wars (1793-1815) exerted unprecedented pressures on Britain's fiscal and monetary policy settings. Policy makers had to constantly adjust the policy mix as events unfolded. This meant implementing monetary and fiscal policy innovations, such as the suspension of the gold standard and...

Is a strong commitment to monetary stability enough to ensure credibility? The recent literature suggests it might not be if the central bank cannot perform pure interest rate policy and has to resort to balance sheet policy: the central bank's financial strength (i.e. the long-term...

Prior to the Age of Mass Migration, Germans left central Europe to settle primarily in modernday Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. Despite the harsh conditions that the first generation of settlers had to endure, their descendants often fared better, not worse, compared to native...

The development of a well adapted financial system was a main part of the successful Swedish economic modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this paper it is shown that this development followed the pattern of a financial revolution. Major institutional and organizational...

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to...

The limited partnership emerged as a key societal innovation during the early modern age. It allowed an effective separation between partners - those acting and those conferring capital - and it granted limited liability to partners in case of insolvency. The diffusion of limited partnership -...

In 1720, Britain and France convulsed in the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles. Manias and crashes have stalked financial markets ever since, demonstrating the profound difficulty of preventing or mitigating them. Conventional narratives depict the crises as the product of hubris, folly, and...

We document the twin crisis that affected Spain in the mid-1860s. First, we trace back its origins to the international crisis of 1864-66. Next, we describe the particular banking sector of Spain, characterized by the coexistence of the Bank of Spain with multiple local banks of issue. We...