Newly assembled macroeconomic statistics for early modern Portugal reveal one of Europe’s most vigorous colonial traders and at the same time one of its least successful growth records. Using an estimated model in the spirit of Allen (2009) we conclude that intercontinental trade had a...

This paper presents a dynamic partial equilibrium model that endogenizes firms' investment decision on innovation: product innovation causes horizontal expansion growth, and process innovation causes vertical expansion growth. Market structure in different markets emerges as a consequence of...

This comment explores some implications and extensions of the papers collected in this volume. It stresses the disadvantages of ignoring the very long-run nature of the distributional question. It analyses the difficulty of finding practical as well as satisfactory policy solutions, especially...

The existence of a self-regulating arbitrage mechanism under the gold standard has been traditionally considered as one of its main advantages, and attracted a corresponding research interest. This research is arguably relevant not only to test for the efficiency of the gold points, but also to...

Portugal was the first independent nation to follow Britain in joining the gold standard. Although beset by persistent current account deficits and heavily dependent on foreign capital inflows, it enjoyed a relatively stable tenure of 37 years on gold. This paper shows how it was possible to...

As long as Portugal was on the gold standard, the Bank of Portugal, sought to stabilize the currency at the exchange rate to which the country was committed. Because it was subject to political and other constraints, the Bank carried out discount rate interventions excessively sparingly,...

The existence of a self-regulating arbitrage mechanism under the gold standard has been traditionally considered as one of its main advantages, and attracted a corresponding research interest. This research is arguably relevant not only to test for the efficiency of the “gold points”, but...