Abstract EN:

The thesis puts together three essays in 19th century financial history. The first chapter looks at foreign exchange policy in the gold-standard period and challenges the conventional wisdom that the gold standard was stabilized by an automatic mechanism whenever the spot exchange rate reached the “gold points”. Building on insights from the target zone and market microstructure literature, i study the Austro-Hungarian currency band. Instead of defending a band on the margin, the central bank engaged in sophisticated operations including sale-repurchase contracts. Exchange rate stabilization under the gold standard appears much more “modern” than traditionally recognized. The second chapter looks at the administration of the branch networks central banks created on a large scale in the second half of the 19th century. An understudied aspect of cb history, these networks provide significant lessons on the evolution of central banks towards modern public-interest institutions and on the role of public policy in the emergence of national money and credit markets. I show how questions of information economics influence both the integration process and cb policy. The final chapter includes two articles coauthored with Marc Flandreau. The first provides rigorous foundations to the concept of “core” and “periphery” in international monetary relations. In a second paper we provide the first review of critical empirical issues in the economics of international currencies. We report evidence in favor of the search-theoretic approach, strategic externalities and persistence. We reject pure path dependency, however. The system cannot remain locked into some past equilibrium forever.