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  3. Studies in Macroeconomic History

The titles in this series investigate themes of interest to economists and economic historians in the rapidly developing field of macroeconomic history. The four areas covered include the application of monetary and finance theory, international economics and quantitative methods to historical problems; the historical application of growth and development theory and theories of business fluctuations; the history of domestic and international monetary, financial and other macroeconomic institutions; and the history of international monetary and financial systems.

  • General Editors: Michael D. Bordo, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Associate Editors: Owen F. Humpage, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Christopher M. Meissner, University of California, Davis, Kris James Mitchener, Santa Clara University, California, David C. Wheelock, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis

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51 results in Studies in Macroeconomic History

Page 2 of 3

On Central Banking
  • Jan Fredrik Qvigstad
  • Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    30 June 2016
  • 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.

Central Banks at a Crossroads
  • What Can We Learn from History?
  • Edited by Michael D. Bordo, Øyvind Eitrheim, Marc Flandreau, Jan F. Qvigstad
  • Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016
  • Throughout their long history, the primary concern of central banks has oscillated between price stability in normal times and financial stability in extraordinary times. In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, central banks have been given additional responsibilities to ensure financial stability, which has sparked intense debate over the nature of their role. Bankers and policy makers face an enormous challenge finding the right balance of power between the central bank and the state. This volume is the result of an international conference held at Norges Bank (the central bank of Norway). International experts and policy makers present research and historical analysis on the evolution of the central bank. They specifically focus on four key aspects: its role as an institution, the part it plays within the international monetary system, how to delineate and limit its functions, and how to apply the lessons of the past two centuries.

The Federal Reserve's Role in the Global Economy
  • A Historical Perspective
  • Edited by Michael D. Bordo, Mark A. Wynne
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    01 April 2016
  • The importance of international considerations in the US Federal Reserve System's deliberations has become more and more important over time as global financial crises and events create ever stronger repercussions in the US economy. This book critically evaluates the role of the Federal Reserve System as a player in the international monetary system over the past one hundred years, starting with its initial responsibility under the gold standard and looking ahead to the challenges it will face in the twenty-first century under the fiat standard. The book is based on a conference of the same name held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in September 2014, as part of the Federal Reserve System's centennial, and contributors include many of the most highly regarded financial historians and policymakers.

Current Federal Reserve Policy Under the Lens of Economic History
  • Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System's Centennial
  • Edited by Owen F. Humpage
  • Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    05 March 2015
  • In December 2012, as a kick-off to the Federal Reserve System's centennial, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland asked leading monetary historians and macroeconomic economists to address current and recurring economic concerns that confront central banks from a historical perspective. The resulting papers, published in this volume, cover a wide range of issues, including the meaning of central-bank independence, the role of communications and rules in fostering credibility, the evolution of the lender-of-last-resort function, the mechanism through which banks transmit economic shocks, and prospects for a European monetary union. A retrospective on the Federal Reserve, this book contains essays by some of the world's most prominent financial historians and provides a thorough overview of the evolution of the monetary standard over the past two centuries. Offering historical context as a complement to economic theory and empiricism, these papers investigate how financial infrastructure shapes economic outcomes through comparisons of Canada and the United States.

The Origins, History, and Future of the Federal Reserve
  • A Return to Jekyll Island
  • Edited by Michael D. Bordo, William Roberds
  • Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2013
  • This book contains essays presented at a conference held in November 2010 to mark the centenary of the famous 1910 Jekyll Island meeting of leading American financiers and the US Treasury. The 1910 meeting resulted in the Aldrich Plan, a precursor to the Federal Reserve Act that was enacted by Congress in 1913. The 2010 conference, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Rutgers University, featured assessments of the Fed's near 100-year track record by prominent economic historians and macroeconomists. The final chapter of the book records a panel discussion of Fed policy making by the current and former senior Federal Reserve officials.

The Great Recession
  • Market Failure or Policy Failure?
  • Robert L. Hetzel
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    16 April 2012
  • 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.

Credibility and the International Monetary Regime
  • A Historical Perspective
  • Edited by Michael D. Bordo, Ronald MacDonald
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    09 April 2012
  • The present global monetary regime is based on floating among the major advanced countries. A key underlying factor behind the present regime is credibility to maintain stable monetary policies. The origin of credibility in monetary regimes goes back to the pre-1914 classical gold standard. In that regime, adherence by central banks to the rule of convertibility of national currencies in terms of a fixed weight of gold provided a nominal anchor to the price level. Between 1914 and the present several monetary regimes gradually moved away from gold, with varying success in maintaining price stability and credibility. In this book, the editors present ten studies combining historical narrative with econometrics that analyze the role of credibility in four monetary regimes, from the gold standard to the present managed float.

The Bank of England
  • 1950s to 1979
  • Forrest Capie
  • Published online:
    05 July 2011
    Print publication:
    20 July 2010
  • 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.

Europe's Postwar Recovery
  • Edited by Barry Eichengreen
  • Published online:
    07 September 2010
    Print publication:
    07 December 1995
  • Western Europe's recovery from World War II was nothing short of miraculous. From the chaos of the war and the crisis of 1947, Europe moved directly to the most rapid quarter-century of economic growth in her history. The contributors to this volume seek to identify the sources of this singularly successful recovery. That all European countries shared in the miracle suggests that its roots may lie at the international level. The chapters therefore focus on the role played by international institutions - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Payments Union, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - and weigh the relative importance of domestic and international factors in Europe's postwar recovery. This book will be of interest to students of modern European history and to economists interested in economic growth, European economic integration, and reform of the Bretton Woods institutions.

Fixed Ideas of Money
  • Small States and Exchange Rate Regimes in Twentieth-Century Europe
  • Tobias Straumann
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    14 June 2010
  • 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.

The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve
  • A History
  • Robert L. Hetzel
  • Published online:
    26 May 2010
    Print publication:
    17 March 2008
  • 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.

Monetary Regimes in Transition
  • Michael D. Bordo, Forrest Capie
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    21 October 1993
  • This important contribution to comparative economic history examines different countries' experiences with different monetary regimes, laying particular emphasis on how the regimes fared when placed under stress such as wars or other changes in the economic environment. Covering the experience of ten countries over the period 1700–1990, the contributors employ the latest techniques of economic analysis in their studies. Several papers are concerned with the transformation from bimetallism to gold monometallism in the nineteenth century and the determinants of monetary regimes transformation in the core countries of Britain, France and the United States. Others focus on the successful and unsuccessful gold standard experiences of Canada, Australia, and Spain, while yet others examine the experience of wartime and postwar stabilizations surrounding the two World Wars and the Napoleonic War.

Transferring Wealth and Power from the Old to the New World
  • Monetary and Fiscal Institutions in the 17th through the 19th Centuries
  • Edited by Michael D. Bordo, Roberto Cortés-Conde
  • Published online:
    27 March 2010
    Print publication:
    08 October 2001
  • This book contains a collection of essays comparing the evolution of the fiscal and monetary regimes of the Old World colonial powers - England, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands - from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries with the experiences of several of their former colonies in the New World of the Americas: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. The objective is to see how such fiscal and monetary institutions were modified or replaced by new ones. The case studies in the collection consider the experience of the colonies after they became independent countries; they examine the factors that allowed efficient fiscal institutions to develop in some countries, while in others such development turned out to be unsuccessful; and they consider why some governments were able to live within their means and provide public goods, while for others expenditures frequently exceeded revenue, often leading to fiscal crises.

The Rise of Financial Capitalism
  • International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason
  • Larry Neal
  • Published online:
    25 March 2010
    Print publication:
    25 January 1991
  • 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. Based on computer analysis of thousands of price quotes from the financial press of the eighteenth century, the results should force both historians and economists to re-evaluate their understanding of the evolution of financial markets and their importance for the economic developments of that era.

Elusive Stability
  • Essays in the History of International Finance, 1919–1939
  • Barry Eichengreen
  • Published online:
    21 March 2010
    Print publication:
    23 February 1990
  • This volume provides a new interpretation of the operation and macroeconomic repercussions of the international monetary system during the interwar years. Each of the eleven essays is explicitly concerned with the role of exchange rates in macroeconomic fluctuations from the American and European perspective. The final essay examines the interwar experience from a long-term perspective.

The Credit-Anstalt Crisis of 1931
  • Aurel Schubert
  • Published online:
    20 March 2010
    Print publication:
    31 January 1992
  • Austria played a prominent role in the worldwide events of 1931 as the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe, the Viennese Credit-Anstalt, collapsed and led Europe into a financial panic that spread to other parts of the world. The events in Austria were pivotal to the economic developments of the 1930s, yet the literature about them has been sparse. In this book, Schubert analyses the crisis using theories of financial crises, identifies the causes of the crisis, examines the market's efficiency in predicting events, analyses how the crisis was transmitted to the real sector, and studies the behaviour of the Austrian as well as international authorities as lenders of last resort. His main conclusion is that even decades after the crisis, many of its lessons are still valid. Managerial and regulatory deficiencies led to the collapse of the bank; the subsequent currency crisis was not an irrational and unexplainable panic by a confused public, but rather a rational response to inconsistencies in policy; and the reactions of the largely unprepared authorities - in Austria as well as abroad - did not help to resolve the crisis quickly.

Japanese Banking
  • A History, 1859–1959
  • Norio Tamaki
  • Published online:
    03 February 2010
    Print publication:
    07 September 1995
  • How did the Japanese achieve their unrivalled position in world banking? This book, first published in 1995, provides a full account in English of the banking industry in Japan for the century following the opening of the country to the outside world in 1859. Professor Tamaki begins by considering the period of experimentation during the Meiji Restoration which resulted in the adoption of the Gold Standard in 1891. He then offers a detailed examination of the highly profitable years up to the end of the First World War and of the subsequent crisis which was hastened by the earthquake that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923 and sealed by the financial collapse of 1927. New light is thrown on the extraordinary role played by the banking industry during the period of military expansionism which culminated with defeat in the Second World War. 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.

Experiments in Financial Democracy
  • Corporate Governance and Financial Development in Brazil, 1882–1950
  • Aldo Musacchio
  • Published online:
    30 January 2010
    Print publication:
    14 September 2009
  • 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. The analysis details the practices of corporate governance, in particular the rights that shareholders have to restrict the actions of managers, and how that shaped different approaches to corporate finance over time. In the case of Brazil, even if the protections for investors included in national laws were relatively weak before 1940, corporate charters contained a series of provisions that protected minority shareholders against the abuses of large shareholders, managers, or other corporate insiders. The investigation uses the Brazilian case to challenge some of the key findings of a recent literature that argues that legal systems (e.g., common vs. civil law) shape the extent of development of stock and bond markets in different nations.

A Monetary History of Italy
  • Michele Fratianni, Franco Spinelli
  • Translated by Anna J. Schwartz
  • Published online:
    31 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 February 1997
  • This volume deals with the monetary history of Italy from its independence in 1861 to 1992. It provides the first complete analysis of a country which has experienced diverse and often dramatic monetary conditions. The authors interpret Italian monetary history through the looking glass of a model which, while monetarist in flavour, is open to other interpretations. A key theme is that public finance is at the root of the (relatively) high Italian inflation rates. The authors argue that there is a strong relationship between the government budget deficit and monetary policy, and that the monetary authorities are too dependent on government. The book contributes in a novel way not only to the monetary debate, but also to fiscal and institutional questions. It combines economic theory, statistical data and history in an accessible way which should prove useful to both economic historians and monetary economists.

Deflation
  • Current and Historical Perspectives
  • Edited by Richard C. K. Burdekin, Pierre L. Siklos
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    06 September 2004
  • This book was originally published in 2004. Fears of deflation seemed nothing more than a relic of the Great Depression. However, beginning in the 1990s, persistently falling consumer prices have emerged in Japan, China and elsewhere. Deflation is also a distinct possibility in some of the major European area economies, especially Germany, and emerged as a concern of the US Federal Reserve in 2003. Deflation may be worse than inflation not only because the real burden of debt rises but also because firms would confront rising real wages in a world where nominal wage rigidity prevails. This volume explores some key themes regarding deflation including: (i) how economic agents and policy makers have responded to deflation, (ii) the links between monetary policy, goods price movements, and asset price movements, (iii) the impact of deflation under different monetary policy and exchange rate regimes, and (iv) stock market reactions to deflation.

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