IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/1321.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Exchange Rates and Casualties During the First World War

Author

Abstract

I estimate a single factor model of Swiss exchange rates during World War I for five of the primary belligerents: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. At the outbreak of the war these nations suspended convertibility of their currencies into gold with the promise that after the war each would restore convertibility at the old par. However, once convertibility was suspended, each currency became a state-contingent claim; after the war it would pay off at (or near) the old par if the country won or pay off significantly less than par (perhaps nothing) if the country lost. The single factor extracted from the five exchange rates appears to contain information on contemporaries' expectations about the war's outcome. Innovations to the single factor are correlated with time series on soldiers killed and wounded and soldiers taken prisoner.

Suggested Citation

  • George J. Hall, 2001. "Exchange Rates and Casualties During the First World War," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1321, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1321
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d13/d1321.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anderson, Evan W. & McGrattan, Ellen R. & Hansen, Lars Peter & Sargent, Thomas J., 1996. "Mechanics of forming and estimating dynamic linear economies," Handbook of Computational Economics, in: H. M. Amman & D. A. Kendrick & J. Rust (ed.), Handbook of Computational Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4, pages 171-252, Elsevier.
    2. Roll, Richard, 1972. "Interest Rates and Price Expectations During the Civil War," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(2), pages 476-498, June.
    3. Bordo Michael D. & Kydland Finn E., 1995. "The Gold Standard As a Rule: An Essay in Exploration," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 32(4), pages 423-464, October.
    4. Barro, Robert J, 1979. "On the Determination of the Public Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages 940-971, October.
    5. Brown, William O. & Burdekin, Richard C. K., 2000. "Turning Points in the U.S. Civil War: A British Perspective," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 60(1), pages 216-231, March.
    6. Hans M. Amman & David A. Kendrick, . "Computational Economics," Online economics textbooks, SUNY-Oswego, Department of Economics, number comp1.
    7. Michael D. Bordo & Eugene N. White, 1990. "British and French Finance During the Napoleonic Wars," NBER Working Papers 3517, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. McCandless, George T, Jr, 1996. "Money, Expectations, and U.S. Civil War," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(3), pages 661-671, June.
    9. Willard, Kristen L & Guinnane, Timothy W & Rosen, Harvey S, 1996. "Turning Points in the Civil War: Views from the Greenback Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(4), pages 1001-1018, September.
    10. Bordo, Michael D. & White, Eugene N., 1991. "A Tale of Two Currencies: British and French Finance During the Napoleonic Wars," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 51(2), pages 303-316, June.
    11. R. R. Kuczynski, 1923. "German Taxation Policy in the World-War," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 31(6), pages 763-763.
    12. repec:cup:jechis:v:60:y:2008:i:01:p:216-231_00 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tobias A. Jopp, 2014. "How did the capital market evaluate Germany’s prospects for winning World War I? Evidence from the Amsterdam market for government bonds," Working Papers 0052, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    2. Miyamoto, Wataru & Nguyen, Thuy Lan & Sheremirov, Viacheslav, 2019. "The effects of government spending on real exchange rates: Evidence from military spending panel data," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 144-157.
    3. Christoph A. Schaltegger & Lukas A. Schmid, 2021. "Public perceptions and bond markets during the Great War: the case of a neutral country," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 186(3), pages 537-561, March.
    4. Samuel MAVEYRAUD & François CHOUNET, 2015. "Correlation of exchange rates and gold standard regime during World War 1 (In French)," Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) 2015-33, Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA).
    5. Asaf Zussman & Noam Zussman & Morten Ørregaard Nielsen, 2008. "Asset Market Perspectives on the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 75(297), pages 84-115, February.
    6. Rodriguez-Lopez, Jesus & Solis-Garcia, Mario, 2018. "Defense spending and fiscal multipliers: it's all in the variance," MPRA Paper 86911, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Bryce Kanago & Ken McCormick, 2013. "The Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate During the First Nine Months of World War II," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 41(4), pages 385-404, December.
    8. Avni Önder Hanedar & Hatice Gaye Gencer & Sercan Demiralay & Ismail Altay, 2017. "Between war and peace: The Ottoman economy and foreign exchange trading at the Istanbul bourse," Working Papers 0108, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    9. Vincent Medina & Cyr-Denis Nidier, 2003. "Pricing war within a real option framework," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(6), pages 425-435.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Antipa, P., 2013. "Fiscal Sustainability and the Value of Money: Lessons from the British Paper Pound, 1797-1821," Working papers 466, Banque de France.
    2. Michael D. Bordo & Finn E. Kydland, 1990. "The Gold Standard as a Rule," NBER Working Papers 3367, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Kim Oosterlinck & Loredana Ureche-Rangau & Jacques-Marie Vaslin, 2013. "Waterloo: a Godsend for French Public Finances?," Working Papers 0041, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    4. Newby, Elisa, 2012. "The suspension of the gold standard as sustainable monetary policy," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(10), pages 1498-1519.
    5. Click, Reid W., 2000. "Seigniorage and conventional taxation with multiple exogenous shocks," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 24(10), pages 1447-1479, September.
    6. Niall Ferguson, 2006. "Political risk and the international bond market between the 1848 revolution and the outbreak of the First World War," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 59(1), pages 70-112, February.
    7. Bordo, Michael D. & Rockoff, Hugh, 1996. "The Gold Standard as a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval”," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 56(2), pages 389-428, June.
    8. Marc D. Weidenmier & Kim Oosterlinck, 2007. "Victory or Repudiation? The Probability of the Southern Confederacy Winning the Civil War," NBER Working Papers 13567, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. P.Antipa, 2014. "How Fiscal Policy Affects the Price Level: Britain’s First Experience with Paper Money," Working papers 525, Banque de France.
    10. Weidenmier, Marc D., 2000. "The Market for Confederate Cotton Bonds," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 76-97, January.
    11. Gary Pecquet & George Davis & Bryce Kanago, 2004. "The Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate Expectations, and the Price of Southern Bank Notes," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(3), pages 616-630, January.
    12. Sophia Lazaretou, 2004. "The Drachma, Foreign Creditors and the International Monetary System: Tales of a Currency during the 19th and the Early 20th Century," Working Papers 16, Bank of Greece.
    13. Richard C. K. Burdekin & Marc D. Weidenmier, 2001. "Inflation Is Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon: Richmond vs. Houston in 1864," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(5), pages 1621-1630, December.
    14. Sophia Lazaretou, 2005. "Greek Monetary Economics in Retrospect: The Adventures of the Drachma," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 34(3), pages 331-370, November.
    15. Cutsinger, Bryan P. & Rouanet, Louis & Ingber, Joshua S., 2023. "Assignats or death: The politics and dynamics of hyperinflation in revolutionary France," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    16. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Juan F. Rubio-Ramirez, 2001. "Comparing dynamic equilibrium economies to data," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2001-23, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    17. Linnea Polgreen & Pedro Silos, 2008. "Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Sensitivity Analysis," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(2), pages 302-313, April.
    18. Campbell Leith & Eric Leeper, 2016. "Understanding Inflation as a Joint Monetary-Fiscal Phenomenon," Working Papers 2016_01, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    19. Mikael Priks, 2005. "Optimal Rent Extraction in Pre-Industrial England and France – Default Risk and Monitoring Costs," CESifo Working Paper Series 1464, CESifo.
    20. Adam Brzezinski & Nuno Palma & François R. Velde, 2024. "Understanding Money Using Historical Evidence," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 16(1), pages 571-595, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    First World War; factor models; principal component analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E40 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - General
    • N14 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: 1913-
    • N24 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: 1913-
    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1321. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.