Books in the Studies in Macroeconomic History series

In this re-examination of Canada's balance-of-payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance-of-payments adjustment.

This book describes the remarkable path which led to the Swiss Franc becoming the strong international currency that it is today. Ernst Baltensperger and Peter Kugler use Swiss monetary history to provide valuable insights into a number of issues concerning the organization and development of monetary institutions and currency that shaped the structure of financial markets and affected the economic course of a country in important ways. They investigate a number of topics, including the functioning of a world without a central bank, the role of competition and monopoly in money and banking, the functioning of monetary unions, monetary policy of small open economies under fixed and flexible exchange rates, the stability of money demand and supply under different monetary regimes, and the monetary and macroeconomic effects of Swiss Banking and Finance. Swiss Monetary History since the Early 19th Century illustrates the value of monetary history for understanding financial markets and macroeconomics today.

This book reassesses Western Europe's miraculous economic recovery from World War II, exposing the role of international institutions and contrasting the very different national experiences. It will be of interest to students of modern European history and to economists.

This book investigates US-UK monetary relations, 1791 to 1931. It presents and examines data on the exchange rate with emphasis on the institutional and legal aspects. It will serve as a Dollar-Sterling handbook for those interested in this important aspect of international monetary history.

These articles by eminent economic historians from the five European colonial powers and from six New World countries focus on the legacy of the Old World fiscal institutions (taxes and expenditures) and monetary institutions (currency and banking) for the New World from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This important contribution to comparative economic history examines different countries' experiences with different monetary regimes. Covering the experience of ten countries over the period 1700-1990, the book employs techniques of economic analysis to explain the adoption and relative success of different regimes.

In this book Mark Toma explores the workings of the early Federal Reserve System as a basis for challenging the conventional wisdom that competition among central banks in a monetary union results in an over issue problem. The book emphasizes the evolution of the Federal Reserve from a competitive to a monopolistic structure.

A study of the impact of monetary policy in the United States on the causes and length of the Great Depression.

These articles by eminent economic historians from the five European colonial powers and from six New World countries focus on the legacy of the Old World fiscal institutions (taxes and expenditures) and monetary institutions (currency and banking) for the New World from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This was the first major study of post-Civil War banking panics in almost a century. The author re-evaluates the role of the New York Clearing House, concluding that structural defects of the National Banking Act were not the primary cause of the panics.

Focusing on the credit generating function of American banks, this history demonstrates that banks aggressively promoted economic development rather than passively followed its course. Professor Bodenhorn uses unexploited data to reveal how banks promoted both industrialization and geographic capital mobility.

This history of bimetallic monetary regimes in the Western world shows how changes in coining technology and fiscal systems affected the evolution of monetary regimes. The book explains why bimetallism was preferred to a gold standard before 1800. This book was first published in 2000.

This 1999 book contains a collection of Michael D. Bordo's classic pieces on the gold standard and related regimes based directly or indirectly on gold convertibility. Although the gold standard and its variants are now history, it still has great appeal for policymakers and scholars.

This book reassesses Western Europe's miraculous economic recovery from World War II, exposing the role of international institutions and contrasting the very different national experiences. It will be of interest to students of modern European history and to economists.

This volume is a comprehensive analysis of the banking and monetary history of Italy from 1861 to 1992. It contributes in a novel way not only to the monetary debate, but also to the fiscal and institutional questions. The authors combine economic theory, statistical data and history in an accessible way.

During the 1950s and 1960s, research on the prewar British economy was influenced strongly by ideas from Keynesian macroeconomics. It is important to reexamine this period of history, asking to what extent the Keynesian vision offers useful insights into advances in time series analysis as well as developments in macroeconomics to answer this question.

An authoritative guide to the transformation of the Bank of England into a modern inflation-targeting independent central bank.

This 2005 book shows that important continuities in central bankers' behavior - response to incentives, desire for financial stability, and susceptibility to government pressures - go a long way toward understanding them, from their beginnings in the Bank of England in 1694 and the first Bank of the United States in 1791, to the present Bank and Federal Reserve.

Covers the history of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), from its founding in Basel in 1930 to the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, with a focus on cooperation among the main central banks for the stability and efficiency of the international monetary system.

This book provides a new quantitative view of the wartime economic experiences of six great powers: the UK, the USA, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USSR. The result of an international collaborative project, it embodies the latest in economic analysis and historical research.

Managing the Franc Poincare is a study of French monetary policy during the Depression. It seeks to explain bankers', politicians' and civil servants' stubborn pursuit of a deflationary way out of the crisis, despite evidence of its failures abroad.

This book, first published in 1995, provides a full account in English of the banking industry in Japan for a century following the opening of the country to the outside world in 1859. The book ends with an assessment of the post-war financial system which developed out of the Macarthur directives and the subsequent American 'democratisation' programme.

Shubert analyses the impact of the Austrian 1931 financial crisis on Europe and the Great Depression, by analysing it using theories of financial crises, identifying the causes of the crisis, and examining the market's efficiency in predicting events. He also analyses how the crisis was transmitted to the real sector, and studies the behaviour of the Austrian as well as international authorities.

This volume provides a new interpretation of the operation and macroeconomic repercussions of the international monetary system during the interwar years. Each of the eleven essays is explicitly concerned with the role of exchange rates in macroeconomic fluctuations from the American and European perspective. The final essay examines the interwar experience from a long-term perspective.

This book explores the evolution of central banks since World War II in 20 industrial countries. The study considers the mix of economic, political and institutional forces that have affected central bank behaviour and its relationship with government.

The first full-length study of five US banking panics of the Great Depression. Previous studies of the Depression have approached the banking panics from a macroeconomic viewpoint; Professor Wicker reconstructs a close historical narrative of each of the panics, investigating their origins, magnitude, and effects.

This book provides a new perspective on the history of central banking, finance and growth before the financial liberalization of the 1980s. Monnet combines economic and historical methods in a novel way that will appeal to historians, economists, political scientists, and policymakers interested in current financial and monetary policies.

This book will interest scholars and practitioners in economics, finance, accounting and law; all areas in which the Lehman bankruptcy has been a major controversy. It will also appeal to a broad audience who care about the causes of the financial crisis and the role of the Federal Reserve's leaders.

Independent scholars from disciplines including economics, history, political science, and law, explain the Bank for International Settlements, the global organisation of central banks. They shed light on how, over the past half century, the BIS has influenced and helped shape the international monetary and financial system.

Ireland's spectacular financial bubble, bust and recovery has been an important strand of the global financial crisis. In this book, an experienced insider provides a detailed narrative of Ireland's crisis and recovery within a discussion of what central banks do well, what they do poorly and how policymaking should adjust.