Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30-year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute this to two structural issues: banks had incentives to protect their local monopolies, and the inherent instability...

The ability of the term structure (specifically the term spread, or the difference between the long and short ends of the yield curve) to predict economic activity is empirically well-established for the US, but less so for small open economies. The literature emphasizes the role of monetary...

We argue that measurement error in historical price data has led researchers to erroneously believe that there was little persistence of inflation during the 19th century. Using a statistical technique that accounts for these errors, we estimate the persistence of (a) US inflation and (b)...