This paper explores the rise of money and class society in ancient Greece, drawing historical and theoretical parallels to the case of ancient Egypt. In doing so, the paper examines the historical applicability of the chartalist and metallist theories of money. It will be shown that the origins...

Die Entschuldung von über schuldeten Staaten über eine lockere Geldpolitik bzw. über finanzielle Repression sichert den Wohlstand in den Industrieländern nicht, argumentieren die Autoren. Der mit der ultra-lockeren Geldpolitik einhergehende graduelle Fall der Produktivitätsgewinne und die...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

This study investigate how debt restructurings have evolved over the decades. Debtors and creditors have a long history of engaging an outsider a third party”, such as the IMF to organise and facilitate debt restructurings. As we show, the importance of these third parties” has grown over...

This paper constructs annual GDP estimates for Ireland (1924-47) to join the first complete official aggregates. The new series is deployed to revisit Ireland's economic performance in the post-independence decades. Ireland's economy grew at 1.5 per cent per annum and average living standards...

This paper is an empirical critique of Barry Eichengreen's interpretation of the exceptional growth performance of Western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. The main part of the paper shows that, at least for the important case of West Germany, Eichengreen fs view of a broad-based economic and...

This paper studies the causes of movements in inflation and output in Switzerland over 160 years between 1855 and 2015. Aggregate supply and demand shocks are identified in a structural VAR and their evolution and effect on prices and output is discussed. Shocks to the Swiss economy have...

As much of the world grapples with post-Covid price gouging, it seems like a good time to revisit our understanding of inflation. In this post, I’m going to test Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘stagflation thesis’. The idea is that ‘stagflation’ — economic stagnation...