Stability Under the Gold Standard in Practice

During her active career as a monetary economist and historian, Anna Schwartz returned to the history of monetary standards many times. In the famed A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Friedman and Schwartz 1963), in her work as executive director of the 1981-82 U.S. Gold Commission (Commission on the Role of Gold in the Domestic and International Monetary Systems 1982), in her introduction to the National Bureau volume A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, 1821-1931 (Bordo and Schwartz 1984), and in books and papers on British and U.S. monetary history before and after these volumes, she has both summarized past knowledge with careful attention to detail and added important pieces to our understanding of the way monetary systems work in practice