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...

Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different...

This article examines the integration of regional Scottish grain markets from the early seventeenth century until the end of the long eighteenth century in 1815. The Scottish economy developed rapidly in this period, with expansion driven by improvements in market structures and specialisation...

Institutions like the IMF, the ECB and many finance ministries and private banks in the world's richest countries are sending out unequivocal calls for strict control of prices to be addressed urgently, given their intrinsic relationship with how the budget deficit and government debt evolve....

This paper introduces the Data Collection Task Force of the South-East European Monetary History Network (SEEMHN DCTF) and its first result. Good policy making should be grounded on good data. To this end, the SEEMHN DCTF works since 2006 towards establishing a SEE macro history database of 19th...

Since the end of World War II, Argentina has been through an uninterrupted series of financial/fiscal and monetary crises that have gradually eroded the credibilityof the economic institutions of the country. In the period from 1970 to 1990 alone, the Argentine economy experienced seven currency...

In the decade before the famine, Ireland experienced a boom in Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). This paper analyses the motivations of MFI proponents and practitioners, and finds evidence linking the boom in MFIs with the introduction of the poor law in 1838. Many contemporary writers saw...

This paper explores why Spanish banks internationalise and why Latin America has been the main region for the international expansion of BBVA and Santander. It shows that prior to 1986 Spanish banks had a limited presence abroad, and analyses the main drivers of this initial expansion...

This paper examines capital adequacy regulation in Germany. After a short overview about financial regulation in Germany in general, the paper focuses on the most important development in the area of capital adequacy regulation from the 1930s up to the financial crisis. Two main trends are...

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this paper examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. This implies that ownership...