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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Private money and money market integration: the role of payments infrastructure in 19th century Switzerland
    (Neuchâtel : IRENE, 2024-09) ;
    Rebecca Stuart
    Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30-year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute this to two structural issues: banks had incentives to protect their local monopolies, and the inherent instability of free banking meant that there was always a risk (which varied across banks) of a bank run. We use a novel counterfactual to show that these risks increased discount rate dispersion, and argue that as a result, public regulation of payments infrastructure was necessary for money market integration.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Is Deflation Costly After All? The Perils of Erroneous Historical Classifications
    (2020-4-14)
    I estimate average economic activity during periods of inflation and deflation while accounting for measurement errors in 19th century prices. These measurement errors lead to underestimation (overestimation) of economic activity during periods of inflation (deflation). By exploiting multiple deflation indicators, it is possible to recover the true relationship; the shortfall of U.S. industrial production growth during periods of deflation ranges from ‐4.5 pp to ‐7.6 pp, instead of ‐2 pp. I also find a negative relationship between deflation and real activity in the U.K. I then examine the cross‐country variation in the estimates for eleven countries. The patterns are consistent with stronger biases for countries with more serious measurement errors in prices.