The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution was Financed with Paper Money--Initial Design and Ideal Performance

Preliminary versions were presented at Queens University, Kingston, Canada, 2010; University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, 2010; the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2011; the annual meeting of the Economic History Association, Boston, MA, 2011; the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 2011; the Conference on "The American Constitution: 225th Anniversary of the Ratification" sponsored by the National Science Foundation held at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, March 2013; and the Seventh World Congress of Cliometrics, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2013. The author thanks the participants for their comments. Research assistance by John Bockrath, Jiaxing Jiang, and Zachary Rose, and editorial assistance by Tracy McQueen, are gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.