Financial Integration in Late Nineteenth-Century Austria

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Abstract
The process of financial integration has been charted in several studies of the late nineteenth-century U.S. economy but lacks comparable documentation in a European case. This gap is filled through an examination of interregional interest rate trends in the pre-World War I Austrian economy. The Austrian data show a marked trend toward rate convergence beginning in the 1870s. These results are significant for the U.S. case and for the long standing debate on the economic viability of the Habsburg Monarchy before World War I and of the successor states in the interwar period.