This paper revises and extends our previous (1986) analysis of rates of return on sterling and dollar foreign loans of the 1920s. It analyzes a larger sample of 250 dollar bonds and 125 sterling issues, covering the years 1920-9. Internal rates of return are adjusted for repurchases of...

This paper shows how in theory, if the contingencies in response to which it is imposed are fully anticipated, independently verifiable and not under government control, then saving and investment should not fall following the imposition of a capital levy. Nor should the government find it more...

This paper analyses the costs and benefits of European monetary unification. The benefits take the form of the reduction in exchange risk, equalization of interest rates, decline in relative price variability and general increase in economic efficiency likely to accompany unification. The costs...

The thesis of this paper is that there is no historical precedent for Europe’s monetary union (EMU). While it is possible to point to similar historical experiences, the most obvious of which were in the 19th century, occurred in Europe, and had “union” as part of their names, EMU differs...

The international monetary system has passed through a succession of phases characterized alternatively by the dominance of fixed and flexible exchange rates. How are these repeated shifts between fixed and flexible rate regimes to be understood? The present paper specifies and tests six...

Over the past century, the world economy has passed through a succession of phases characterized by very different levels of international capital flows. This paper asks what accounts for these dramatic shifts in the extent of capital movements across national borders. Three categories of...

This paper reassesses the pattern of unemployment in interwar Britain from a microeconomic perspective. A 10 per cent sample of some 27,000 case record cards completed in 1929-31 as part of the New Survey of London Life and Labour is used as a basis for cross-section analysis of unemployment...

An optimum currency area is an economic unit composed of regions affected symmetrically by disturbances and between which labour and other factors of production flow freely. The symmetrical nature of disturbances and the high degree of factor mobility make it optimal to forsake nominal exchange...

This paper documents the effects of exchange rates and the external constraint during the interwar years. In the absence of international policy coordination, exchange rate depreciation is shown to have been a necessary precondition for the adoption of policies promoting recovery from the Great...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...