Current research

My main research interests lie in monetary and financial history, historical business cycles and the economic history of Central, East and South-East Europe.

Monetary and Financial History

The European debt crisis has allowed me to make my research findings in monetary and financial history relevant to a wider audience, beginning in 2012 with the organisation of an international symposium on “The euro: (Greek) tragedy or Europe’s destiny? Economic, historical, and legal perspectives on the common currency”. Increased interest in the historical parallel of today’s travails in the eurozone with the disintegration of the interwar gold standard resulted in several invited presentations, including to the Bank of England, the Bank of Greece and the Austrian National Bank. I subsequently summarised my research in a paper titled “Gold standard lessons for the Eurozone” which was published in 2014 in the Journal of Common Market Studies. I am currently investigating Greece's monetary history and its repeated cycles of entry to and exit from monetary unions, government debt built-up and default, and financial supervision by West European countries (long version and short version).

Historical Business Cycles

In my business cycle research, I am interested in constructing business cycle indices based on common dynamic factor analysis (rather than conventional GDP data which are often of poor quality for historical data). I published some work on Business cycles in South-East Europe from political independence to World War II (with Prof. Martin Ivanov , Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), and I am currently conducting a similar project encompassing all European countries during the 1870-1939 period.

Economic History of Central, East and South-East Europe

Last but not least, I am trying to draw more attention in Western academia to the little-known economic history of Central, East and South-East Europe. I acted as the academic advisor to the South-East European central banks in their efforts to collect, systematise and publish their 19th and 20th century monetary data, and I co-organised the 2014 EHES Summer School devoted to “Catching up or falling behind? Institutions, geography and economic development of Eastern Europe in the long-run” (jointly with Prof. Nikolaus Wolf, Humboldt University Berlin, Prof. Max-Stephan Schulze and Dr. Tamas Vonyo, London School of Economics, and Dr. Alexander Klein, University of Kent, UK). I am currently in the process of editing a multi-authored book on “The economic history of Central, East and South-East Europe, 1800 to the present day”, published by Routledge in late 2017, which will provide an up-to-date account of the economic history of the Eastern half of the European continent.