Bücher der Reihe Studies in Macroeconomic History

Ireland's spectacular financial bubble, bust and recovery has been an important strand of the global financial crisis. In this book, an experienced insider provides a detailed narrative of Ireland's crisis and recovery within a discussion of what central banks do well, what they do poorly and how policymaking should adjust.

This book provides a new perspective on the history of central banking, finance and growth before the financial liberalization of the 1980s. Monnet combines economic and historical methods in a novel way that will appeal to historians, economists, political scientists, and policymakers interested in current financial and monetary policies.

This book describes the remarkable path which led to the Swiss Franc becoming the strong international currency that it is today. Ernst Baltensperger and Peter Kugler use Swiss monetary history to provide valuable insights into a number of issues concerning the organization and development of monetary institutions and currency that shaped the structure of financial markets and affected the economic course of a country in important ways. They investigate a number of topics, including the functioning of a world without a central bank, the role of competition and monopoly in money and banking, the functioning of monetary unions, monetary policy of small open economies under fixed and flexible exchange rates, the stability of money demand and supply under different monetary regimes, and the monetary and macroeconomic effects of Swiss Banking and Finance. Swiss Monetary History since the Early 19th Century illustrates the value of monetary history for understanding financial markets and macroeconomics today.

This book provides a detailed historical description of the evolution of corporate governance and stock markets in Brazil in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it covers the rights that shareholders had to restrict the actions of managers, and how that shaped different approaches to corporate finance over time.

This book uses theoretically motivated econometric analysis to understand the structure, performance, and influence of universal banks and securities markets on industrial firms during industrialisation. The findings show that securities markets can thrive within a civil-law, universal-bank system and suggest that financial system complexity can favour rapid industrial expansion.

This important contribution to comparative economic history examines different countries' experiences with different monetary regimes. Covering the experience of ten countries over the period 1700-1990, the book employs techniques of economic analysis to explain the adoption and relative success of different regimes.

Based on computer analysis of price quotes from the eighteenth-century financial press, this work establishes the existence of a sophisticated and smoothly functioning system of financial markets in the mercantile states of northwestern Europe throughout the 1700s.

A study of the impact of monetary policy in the United States on the causes and length of the Great Depression.

In this book Mark Toma explores the workings of the early Federal Reserve System as a basis for challenging the conventional wisdom that competition among central banks in a monetary union results in an over issue problem. The book emphasizes the evolution of the Federal Reserve from a competitive to a monopolistic structure.

This 2005 book shows that important continuities in central bankers' behavior - response to incentives, desire for financial stability, and susceptibility to government pressures - go a long way toward understanding them, from their beginnings in the Bank of England in 1694 and the first Bank of the United States in 1791, to the present Bank and Federal Reserve.

Focusing on the credit generating function of American banks, this history demonstrates that banks aggressively promoted economic development rather than passively followed its course. Professor Bodenhorn uses unexploited data to reveal how banks promoted both industrialization and geographic capital mobility.

The first full-length study of five US banking panics of the Great Depression. Previous studies of the Depression have approached the banking panics from a macroeconomic viewpoint; Professor Wicker reconstructs a close historical narrative of each of the panics, investigating their origins, magnitude, and effects.

In this re-examination of Canada's balance-of-payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance-of-payments adjustment.

Covers the history of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), from its founding in Basel in 1930 to the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, with a focus on cooperation among the main central banks for the stability and efficiency of the international monetary system.

This was the first major study of post-Civil War banking panics in almost a century. The author re-evaluates the role of the New York Clearing House, concluding that structural defects of the National Banking Act were not the primary cause of the panics.

This history of bimetallic monetary regimes in the Western world shows how changes in coining technology and fiscal systems affected the evolution of monetary regimes. The book explains why bimetallism was preferred to a gold standard before 1800. This book was first published in 2000.

This 1999 book contains a collection of Michael D. Bordo's classic pieces on the gold standard and related regimes based directly or indirectly on gold convertibility. Although the gold standard and its variants are now history, it still has great appeal for policymakers and scholars.

This volume is a comprehensive analysis of the banking and monetary history of Italy from 1861 to 1992. It contributes in a novel way not only to the monetary debate, but also to the fiscal and institutional questions. The authors combine economic theory, statistical data and history in an accessible way.

This book explores the evolution of central banks since World War II in 20 industrial countries. The study considers the mix of economic, political and institutional forces that have affected central bank behaviour and its relationship with government.

This book, first published in 1995, provides a full account in English of the banking industry in Japan for a century following the opening of the country to the outside world in 1859. The book ends with an assessment of the post-war financial system which developed out of the Macarthur directives and the subsequent American 'democratisation' programme.

Managing the Franc Poincare is a study of French monetary policy during the Depression. It seeks to explain bankers', politicians' and civil servants' stubborn pursuit of a deflationary way out of the crisis, despite evidence of its failures abroad.

Shubert analyses the impact of the Austrian 1931 financial crisis on Europe and the Great Depression, by analysing it using theories of financial crises, identifying the causes of the crisis, and examining the market's efficiency in predicting events. He also analyses how the crisis was transmitted to the real sector, and studies the behaviour of the Austrian as well as international authorities.

This book provides a broad overview of monetary developments in Norway over the past 200 years, using a rich variety of graphical illustrations based on a unique data set of historical monetary statistics, which will be documented and made available on the Norges Bank website (in English) at http://www.norges-bank.no/en. Throughout the book, Norway's monetary developments are anchored in a historical context and in the development of monetary thinking. Through their analysis of the historical data, the authors provide new insights and comparisons to other Scandinavian countries, along with an excellent examination of the development and character of the banking and financial system in Norway.

Since publication of Hetzel's The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the intellectual consensus that had characterized macroeconomics has disappeared. That consensus emphasized efficient markets, rational expectations and the efficacy of the price system in assuring macroeconomic stability. The 2008-9 recession not only destroyed the professional consensus about the kinds of models required to understand cyclical fluctuations but also revived the credit-cycle or asset-bubble explanations of recession that dominated thinking in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. These 'market-disorder' views emphasize excessive risk taking in financial markets and the need for government regulation. The present book argues for the alternative 'monetary-disorder' view of recessions. A review of cyclical instability over the last two centuries places the 2008-9 recession in the monetary-disorder tradition, which focuses on the monetary instability created by central banks rather than on a boom-bust cycle in financial markets.

In these six lectures given at the Norwegian Royal Academy of Science and Letters, Jan Qvigstad draws on his deep experience at Norges Bank to outline key principles on which to base central bank policy. The first two lectures (Keeping promises and Transparency) emphasize the importance of credibility and ensuring accountability. Lectures 3-6 can be viewed as applying these key principles to specific issues (Making good decisions; Managing wealth; Learning from history; and Institutions). The lectures do not break new ground - indeed, Qvigstad nicely illustrates how these principles have been articulated in literature, history and politics. Rather, the lectures emphasize the lessons to be drawn by applying these principles to central banking history with primary reference to the case of Norway, such as managing Norway's sovereign wealth fund and designing institutions that will produce good policy outcomes.

This history of the Bank of England takes its story from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. This period probably saw the peak of the Bank's influence and prestige, as it dominated the financial landscape. One of the Bank's central functions was to manage the exchange rate. It was also responsible for administering all the controls that made up monetary policy. In the first part of the period, the Bank did all this with a remarkable degree of freedom. But economic policy was a failure, and sluggish output, banking instability and rampant inflation characterised the 1970s. The pegged exchange rate was discontinued, and the Bank's freedom of movement was severely constrained, as new approaches to policy were devised and implemented. The Bank lost much of its freedom of movement but also took on more formal supervision.

Most European countries are rather small, yet we know little about their monetary history. This book analyses for the first time the experience of seven small states (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland) during the last hundred years, starting with the restoration of the gold standard after World War I and ending with Sweden's rejection of the Euro in 2003. The comparative analysis shows that for the most part of the twentieth century the options of policy makers were seriously constrained by a distinct fear of floating exchange rates. Only with the crisis of the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1992-3 did the idea that a flexible exchange rate regime was suited for a small open economy gain currency. The book also analyses the differences among small states and concludes that economic structures or foreign policy orientations were far more important for the timing of regime changes than domestic institutions and policies.

Details the evolution of the monetary standard from the start of the Federal Reserve through the end of the Greenspan era. The book places that evolution in the context of the intellectual and political environment of the time. By understanding the fitful process of replacing a gold standard with a paper money standard, the conduct of monetary policy becomes a series of experiments useful for understanding the fundamental issues concerning money and prices. How did the recurrent monetary instability of the 20th century relate to the economic instability and to the associated political and social turbulence? After the detour in policy represented by FOMC chairmen Arthur Burns and G. William Miller, Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan established the monetary standard originally foreshadowed by William McChesney Martin, who became chairman in 1951. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve explains in a straightforward way the emergence and nature of the modern, inflation-targeting central bank.

Based on a conference held as part of the US Federal Reserve System's centennial, this book critically evaluates the role of the Federal Reserve System in the international monetary system over the past one hundred years and looks ahead to the challenges it will face under the twenty-first-century fiat standard.

The role of the central bank has become a subject of intense debate in the wake of the recent global financial crisis. In this volume, experts and policy makers discuss what lessons we can draw by examining the evolution of the central bank over the past two centuries.