This paper examines the Swedish record of competition in the supply of bank notes in the 19th century. Between 1831 and 1902, private commercial banks, organized as partnerships with unlimited liability for their owners, issued notes competing with the notes of the Riksbank, the bank owned by...

We use a Bayesian dynamic factor model to measure Germanys pre WorldWar I economic activity. The procedure makes better use of existing time seriesdata than historical national accounting. To investigate industrializationwe propose to look at comovement between sectors. We find that...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able tocredibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences theirdecisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

This paper examines the comovement of the stock market and of real activity inGermany before World War I under the efficient market hypothesis. We employ multivariate spectral analysis to compare rivaling national product estimates to stock market behavior in the frequency domain. Close...

In this article, we use as case study the Spanish economy in the Early Modern period. We use recent time series data for the period 1492 - 1810. We consider the possibility that a linear cointegrated regression model with multiple structural changes would provide a good empirical description of...

Over the last 10 years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in the English king Richard III, especially after his remains are found in 2012 after being lost or missing for centuries. Prior to this, there are many publications, reports, and documentaries alluding to a “smear”...

Some selected examples from trade history and even more the rise of superstar firms in the early twenty first century make visible the eminence of monetary delocalization in the process of market creation. Market creation is highly concentrated in space. As a result, inside and outside money...

This research note/paper examines several factors that have been mentioned and debated as determinants of how Britain moves from feudalism to mercantilism and then to capitalism by way of agricultural and industrial innovations and also how it arrives at the cusp of the industrial revolution. Of...

This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe’s early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...