In this paper we reconsider the international market integration, starting at high levels in the late nineteenth century, collapsing between the wars, and recovering gradually after 1945 to reach levels comparable to pre-1914 in the 1990's. The empirical evidence we survey suggests that in some...

In this paper we show that the acceleration of inflation in the United States after 1965 reflected a shift in perceived responsibility for managing the country's international financial position. Prior to 1965 this responsibility was lodged primarily with the Fed, whose policies resembled those...

In this paper we analyze the changing role of gold in the international monetary system, in particular the persistence of gold holdings by monetary authorities for 20 years following the breakdown of the Brettone Woods system system and the Second Amendment to the Articles of Agreement of the...

In this paper we speculate about the evolution of the international monetary system in the last 2/3 of the 20th century absent the Great Depression but present the major post-Depression political and economic upheavals: WWII and II and the Cold War. We argue that without the Depression the...

We consider the operation of international capital markets in two periods of globalization, before 1914 and after 1971, with a focus on the crisis problem. We explore the idea that the incidence of crises in these two periods reflects how capital flows were embedded in the larger economic...

This paper pursues the comparison of economic integration today and pre 1914 for trade as well as finance, primarily for the United States but also with reference to the wider world. We establish the outlines of international integration a century ago and analyze the institutional and...

In this paper we first trace the changing nature of banking, currency and debt crises from the last century to the present. Each type of crisis has transmogrified in the presence of official intervention and the creation of a safety net. A similar pattern is observed for international rescue...

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any...

In this paper we survey the historical record for over two centuries on the connection between expansionary fiscal policy and inflation. As a backdrop, we briefly lay out several theoretical approaches to the effects of fiscal deficits on inflation: the earlier Keynesian and monetarist...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...