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...

This paper examines whether the different macroeconomic performances of the German economy in two post-war decades provide evidence for the theory (first advanced by Mancur Olson) that sharp institutional breaks are conducive to economic growth because they destroy the existing network of...

Did living standards stagnate before the Industrial Revolution? Traditional real-wage indices typically show broadly constant living standards before 1800. In this paper, we show that living standards rose substantially, but surreptitiously because of the growing availability of new goods....

This paper assesses the strength of productivity spillovers non-parametrically in a data-set of 12 industries and 231 NUTS2 regions in 17 European Union member countries between 1992 and 2006. It devotes particular attention to measuring catching up through spillovers depending on the technology...

The severity of the Great Depression in Germany has sometimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations relied on American capital exports, the demise of the Gold Standard, or on malfunc¬tions of the domestic economy, such as excessive wage increases during...

During the Greek debt crisis after 2010, the German government insisted on harsh austerity measures. This led to a rapid cooling of relations between the Greek and German governments. We compile a new index of public acrimony between Germany and Greece based on newspaper reports and internet...

We study the determination of Irish inflation between 1935 and 2012 using a Phillips curve approach. We find that a simple backward-looking Phillips Curve that incorporates import prices is stable over the sample period and passes a number of diagnostic tests. We also consider the importance of...

In this paper we assemble an annual data set on broad and narrow money, prices, real economic activity and interest rates in Ireland from a variety of sources for the period 1933-2012. We discuss in detail how the data set is constructed and what assumptions we have made in doing so....

Between 2000 and 2012, the Portuguese economy grew less than the United States during the Great Depression and less than Japan during its lost decade. This paper asks why this happened, with a particular focus on the slump between 2000 and 2007. It describes the main facts of Portugal's recent...

Using annual data from several sources, we study the evolution of M1, M2, income, prices and long and short interest rates in Ireland over the period 1933-2012. We find cointegration and that prices, income and interest rates are weakly exogenous. While the estimates for M2 are stable and close...