For the upcoming conference “Free Banking systems: diversity in financial and economic growth” at Lund University School of Economics and Management (Sweden), September 4–5, 2014 I have written a paper titled "Establishing an International Data Archive on Free Banking."  The idea came from a post I wrote several months ago. Here is the abstract:

In the past 40 years, enough work has been done on historical cases of free banking to show that it was a widespread phenomenon. There has been no concerted effort, however, to draw all this material together. The Internet, which did not exist when the revival of interest in free banking began, offers the chance to create an open international research hub to bring together a mass of statistical, legal, and other material on the various cases of free banking. I describe the advantages of a research hub, what components it should include, and an existing research hub that provides a model.

Click here for the paper. Unfortunately I have a prior commitment to another conference, but my coauthor on another paper, Patrick Mardini, will be presenting the paper if the organizers wish to keep it on the schedule and he will relay comments from the conference to me. I welcome your reactions to the paper in the comment section below.

If any readers are interested in attending the conference (on which I have previously posted), please contact the main organizer, Anders Ögren ([email protected]) to see if there is room.