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

In this paper, the influence of information costs on the integration of Northern European financial markets between ca. 1350 and 1560 is explored. The approach is based on splitting information costs into their constitutive components and on measuring one of these, i.e. the costs of transmitting...

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters were responsible for the severe losses that the supporters of free trade suffered in the second of these contests, and that allowed the protectionists to gain the...

In this paper we present a new method for estimating market integration under a commodity money system such as that which existed in Europe until the demise of the gold standard. The approach is based on the analysis of deviations between exchange rates and parity, which under conditions of a...