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This special issue of the Financial History Review contributes to the vast literature on the political economy of monetary unions. Inspired by the recent events in Europe, it reaches back in history to consider an earlier experiment in forming a monetary (as well as economic and political) union. In this historical case the pivotal event was the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788, two centuries before the Maastricht Treaty. Between formal independence in 1781 and the implementation of the Constitution reforms in 1789, the fledgling country was organised politically into a loose confederation of thirteen, virtually sovereign states. Despite the nominal powers granted to the national government under the Articles of Confederation, it lacked the direct means to collect taxes and to enforce its policies. Consequently, during this brief period, state governments could and did pursue their own economic and monetary policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responds to an article written by Michael Pammer, entitled `Proxy-data and Income Estimates,' which focused on economic forecasting in Europe. Reference to the regression model; Indepth look at the effectiveness of the proxy-approach; Availability of statistical data.

Investigates the role of banking in the industrialization in Europe during the 19th-century. Factors which contributed to the conditioning of institutional structures.

This study addresses the incompatibility question between the corporate organization of industry and a system based on the general recognition of economic rights and freedoms in continental western Europe. A dissociation/identification model based on a comparative analysis verifies the consistency of the premise that makes the emergence of economic rights possible only after suppressing the corporations of trades. The model stems coherently from the ideas of eighteenth-century political economists and crystallizes in reform policies aimed at eliminating corporate elements contrary to economic freedoms. The results directly link the intellectual model and the actual expressions of economic rights within the declarations written at the end of the old regime. While dissociation creates an opportunity for corporate continuity within a framework of recognized economic freedoms, the French identification model implies the suppression of corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review explores recent historiography on the international and imperial dimensions of nineteenth-century British politics. In particular, it charts historians' attempts to assess how British engagement with politics overseas – in Europe, the empire, and the 'rest of the world' – helped to shape domestic political structures, cultures, and ideologies. While concentrating mainly on studies produced during the last twenty years, the review also affirms the continued relevance of work from before the turn of the century, and suggests that some of the most compelling approaches to connecting 'domestic' and 'international' politics may lie in older historiography. It proposes also that political historians might engage more closely with relevant scholarship by intellectual historians and historians of political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study trade in Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another after 1989 than predicted by a standard gravity model. Cultural trading capital, established under Habsburg rule and maintained in the period of the Iron Curtain, seems to have survived over four decades of separation and gives an initial boost to trade. This surplus trade disappeared rapidly after 1990 as countries rearranged themselves with the new geopolitical circumstances. We document the rate of decay of these forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key "moments" in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional representation, and the process through which those interests were translated into actual legislative decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper finds evidence of nonlinearities in the dynamics of the euro area demand for the narrow aggregate M1. A long-run money demand relationship is first estimated over a sample period covering the past three decades. Although the parameters of the relationship are jointly stable, there are indications of nonlinearity in the residuals of the error-correction model. This nonlinearity is explicitly modeled using a fairly general Markov switching error-correction model with satisfactory results. The empirical findings of the paper are consistent with theoretical predictions of nonlinearities in the dynamics of adjustment to equilibrium stemming from ?buffer stock? and ?target-threshold? models and with analogous empirical evidence for European countries and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion. Offers a look at a proxy-data approach invented by David Good to predict income in 11 European countries. Identification and basis of three proxy variables; Conclusions of the findings; Availability of statistical data to support findings.

Responds to comments made by author John Komlos on the article `Productivity Growth Without Technical Change in European Agriculture Before 1850,' published in the June 1987 issue of the `Journal of Economic History.' Data used in the report; Comparison between the output of agricultural workers in the United States and Great Britain.