Marc Flandreau appointed Visiting Professor of Financial History 2024
Marc Flandreau, Howard S. Marks Professor of Economic History, University of Pennsylvania, is a world-renowned economist and specialist in the economic history of international money, finance and debt. His areas of expertise encompass the international monetary system, financial crises and regulation, sovereign default, debt restructuring and the geopolitics of finance.
A graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, he obtained his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1993 and became in 2001 the youngest tenured faculty at French elite school Sciences Po, Paris. In 2017, he was appointed the Howard S. Marks Professor of Economic History in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania where he holds as well a secondary appointment at the Wharton School.
Flandreau has trained two generations of economic historians who now occupy leading positions in higher education, international organizations and government. His academic background doubles up with real-world expertise including chief economist France with Lehman Brothers (2002-2008). He is currently chair of the Irving Fisher Committee for Long Run Macro-Financial Data and retro-prospective, the BIS-sponsored Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics which he contributed to create with the Bank of Norway.
Flandreau has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and authored several books and is the founding editor of Capitalism, A Journal of Economics and History, a Penn Press journal devoted to inter-disciplinary dialogue on capitalism. He has participated in the editorial boards of the main economic history journals and was president of the European Historical Economics Society in 2006-2008.
He is in particular the author of a monetary history classic on the birth of the international gold standard, The Glitter of Gold, (Oxford 2003). His work on the long-run evolution of FX reserves in the 20th century and in particular his revisionist account of the timing of the emergence of the dollar as an international currency (The rise and fall of the dollar, 2009, European Review of Economic History, with Barry Eichengreen) have reshaped the literature and policy debate. More recently he wrote of Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange, a study of the economics of English-learned societies in the 19th century (Chicago, 2016, forthcoming in Chinese with The Commercial Press). He is currently working on a project on the long-run history of sovereign default.
During his stay in Frankfurt during the Summer Semester, Marc Flandreau will hold a public lecture (22 May) on “The Law and Economics of Governed Platforms: Lessons from the Origins of the London Stock Exchange” and organize an international conference (20 June) on restructuring international sovereign debt. Also, he will give a seminar on “The International Monetary System: History and Prospects” as part of the Money & Finance and International Economics and Economic Policy Master's programs at the Department of Economics and Business at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Professor Flandreau is the eighth holder of the Goethe University Visiting Professorship of Financial History. In the context of this professorship, distinguished international experts in banking and financial history are invited to share their research insights and methods with researchers, students and the interested public in Frankfurt. Cooperation partners are the Leibniz-Institute for Financial Research SAFE at the House of Finance and the Institut für Bank- und Finanzgeschichte. Previous visiting professors were Benjamin Friedman, Harvard University (2015), Caroline Fohlin, Emory University, Atlanta (2016), Hans-Joachim Voth, Universität Zürich (2017), Harold James, Princeton University (2018), Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley (2019), Catherine R. Schenk, Oxford University (2021/2) und Eugene N. White, Rutgers University (2023).
