Gregor W. Smith | QED

Gregor W. Smith


1. Contact

Electronic mail: gregor dot smith at queensu dot ca         Phone: (613) 533-6659

Mail: Department of Economics, Queen's University, Kingston Ontario K7L 3N6 Canada        Office: Room A520, Mackintosh-Corry Hall


2. Biographical Information

Professor of Economics         B.A. (Queen's); M.A. Hons. (St. Andrews); M.Phil, D.Phil (Nuffield College, Oxon)

Biographical Note        CEA Fellow


3. Past Projects and Doctoral Students

My research is in open-economy macroeconomics, macroeconometrics, and economic history.

Here are lists of publications (with links to co-authors) and past doctoral students. CV, IDEAS page, and citations page.

Here are some historical sterling/dollar exchange rates for 1860–1878, the 1920s, and the 1950s, that we have used in some published work.

Disclosure of outside activities.


4. Recent Research

  • Real Exchange Rates in the European Price Revolution (2025)

    The European price revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries is one of the earliest episodes of widely-recognized inflation. I use inter-city real exchange rates in silver to assess how extensively it spread, how rapidly long-run PPP was restored, and whether periodic debasements affected relative prices. Inflation shocks originating in Spain gradually diffused across Europe, but there is little evidence of differential impacts related to distance. Overall the properties of real exchange rates are strikingly similar to those in modern European data

  • US Fiscal Policy Shocks: Proxy-SVAR Overidentification via GMM (with Allan W. Gregory and James McNeil)
    (with online appendix) (2024) Journal of Applied Econometrics 39, 607–619.

    An SVAR in US federal spending, federal revenue, and GDP is a standard setting for the study of the impact of fiscal shocks. An appealing feature of identifying a fiscal shock with an external instrument (proxy variable) is that one can find the effects of that shock without fully identifying the SVAR. But we show that fully or almost fully instrumenting the SVAR allows one to overidentify the model by incorporating the condition that the structural shocks are uncorrelated (via GMM). Over 1948-2019 the overidentifying restrictions are not rejected. The overidentified SVAR yields (a) greater precision in estimating impulse response functions and multipliers and (b) measures of the effects of output shocks even when there is no instrument for them.

  • UK Inflation Dynamics since the Thirteenth Century (with James M. Nason)
    (with online supplement) (2023) International Economic Review 64, 1595–1614.

    Historians have suggested there were waves of inflation or price revolutions in the UK (and earlier England) in the 13th, 16th, and 18th centuries, prior to the ongoing inflation since 1935. We study retail price inflation since 1251 and model its dynamics. The model is an AR(n) but allows for gradually evolving or drifting parameters and stochastic volatility. The long-horizon forecasts suggest only one inflation wave, that of the 20th century. We also use the model to measure inflation predictability and price-level instability from the beginning of the sample and to provide measures of real interest rates since 1695.