We show that, because the cost of the war had been so high in France, the size of the French public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible to stabilise immediately after World War I, even on the anti-Keynesian assumption that a stabilisation would have had no negative effects on income. The reason for the immediate postwar inflation was then not mismanaged policy but a wise choice in the French context; nevertheless, a stabilisation was historically possible from early 1924, and it would most likely have benefited not only France but the entire international monetary system.

How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal- mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A. Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz have made coal central to the story. This article constructs new series on coal rents, the price of coal at pithead and at market, and the price of firewood, and uses them to examine this issue. We conclude coal output expanded in the Industrial Revolution mainly as a result of increased demand rather than technological innovations in mining. But that expansion could have occurred at any time before 1760. Further, our coal rents series suggests that English possession of coal reserves made a negligible contribution to Industrial Revolution incomes.

Simulated optimum tariff policies to achieve plausible government targets show objective reasons for the failure of international trade cooperation during the Slump of 1929 to 1933. For the largest players, the US and UK, benefits from foreign cooperation were small or negative. France and Germany would have been the principal beneficiaries of international cooperative policies. Since cooperation on one issue, tariffs, was difficult, cooperation on many – through the cross-issue bargaining attempted at the 1933 London Conference- was well nigh impossible. Optimum coordination across policy instruments within one country, on the other hand, would have yielded high returns for policy. A corollary is that lack of internal coordination (poor domestic policies) was a more important cause of the Great Depression than failure to harmonise policies internationally.

This article shows that the interaction between economic and demographic variables in England before the onset of modern economic growth did not fit some crucial assumptions of the Malthusian model. I estimated a vector autoregression for data on fertility, mortality and real wages over the period 1541–1840 applying a well-known identification strategy broadly used in macroeconomics. The results show that endogenous adjustment of population to real wages functioned as Malthus assumed only until the seventeenth century: positive checks disappeared during the seventeenth century and preventive checks disappeared before 1740. This implies that the endogenous adjustment of population levels to changes in real wages – one of the cornerstones of the Malthusian model – did not work during an important part of the period usually considered within the ‘Malthusian regime’.

It has become common for authors to argue that government commitment to repay debt depends upon institutions. In this article I present new econometric evidence which shows that in one prominent case, Great Britain after 1688, credibility depended more immediately upon partisan preferences. The ‘revolution’ in British public finance may indeed have been spurred forward by the constitutional changes of the Glorious Revolution, but it was only consolidated in 1715, almost three decades later, during a ‘Whig Supremacy’ where a single party established unchecked control over British political institutions. It mattered a great deal for the final outcome that the Whig party was intimately associated with government creditors while their opponents, the Tories, were not. I provide evidence of a structural break in both government costs of borrowing and Bank of England share prices that is consistent with this argument. Using an ARCH-in-mean model, I then show that the evolution of the Whig majority in the House of Commons provides a better explanation for the evolution of government credibility than does either the assumption of a simple structural break in 1715, or an explanation focusing strictly on political stability, and ignoring partisan preferences. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the determinants of credibility.