Did the Classical Gold Standard Lead to Greater Business Cycle Synchronization? Evidence from New Measures
运用两种新的商业周期一致性测度，发现古典金本位并未如先前研究所表明的那样提高成员国之间的商业周期同步性。
Summary Previous studies have presented findings suggesting that the gold standard may have led to an increase in business cycle synchronization among its member countries. This follows a growing literature which posits that currency unions in general lead to greater synchronization of business cycles. The previous papers on the gold standard, however, suffer from simultaneity problems, and incomplete measures of just how synchronized output gaps are. We accordingly apply two new measures of business cycle coherence which have recently been applied to the modern E uro zone. These measures account both for differences in the sign as well as the amplitude of output gaps, and can be computed on a period‐by‐period basis, unlike previous metrics. In addition, we employ two other methods which do not allow for time‐varying estimation, but have been employed in other studies of output convergence. We find, contrary to the earlier studies, that the classical gold standard did not appear to increase the coherence of business cycles.