Did gold-standard adherence reduce sovereign capital costs?

摘要: Abstract A commonly cited benefit of the classical gold standard is that it reduced borrowing costs by signaling a country's commitment to financial probity. Using new dataset, this paper tests whether gold-standard adherence was negatively correlated with cost capital. Conditional on UK risk factors, there no evidence bonds issued countries off earned systematically higher excess returns than gold. This conclusion robust allowing betas differ across exchange-rate regimes; including other determinants country premium; and controlling for British Empire effect.