Marc Flandreau

Marc Flandreau, Howard S. Marks Professor of Economic History 

A native of Paris (France), Flandreau is a world-renown historian and specialist of the economic history of international money, finance and debt. His areas of expertise encompass international monetary history, international currencies, regulation and financial crises. In particular his recent research proposes novel perspectives on the long run evolution of sovereign defaults and debt restructuring. The research proposes to reconstruct the genealogy of important clauses in sovereign debt contracts and ties them to successive debt restructuring orders and the underlying geopolitics.

A graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, he obtained his PhD as part of the European Program in Quantitative Economics, awarded by London School of Economics (requirements) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (dissertation). In 1999 he was awarded the Bronze Medal for outstanding young researcher by the CNRS and in 2001 he became the youngest tenured faculty and Chair of International Finance at Sciences Po, Paris.

In 2008, he joined the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Development in Geneva under joint appointment from the Economics and History Departments and was a member of the Anthropology Department.

In 2017, he was appointed Howard S. Marks Professor of Economic History at the History Department at Penn and since 2021, he has held a secondary appointment at the Wharton School in the Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department. He is a Research Fellow of CEPR, London and a member of the Policy Panel of the Bank of International Settlements in Basel.

Flandreau has trained two generations of economic historians who now occupy leading academic positions in economic history, international organizations and government. His academic background doubles up with real-world expertise. He has worked with central banks and international organizations and was chief economist with Lehman Brothers France. He is currently chair of the Irving Fisher Committee for the BIS macro-historical data project, Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics.

Flandreau has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and authored several books and has participated to the editorial boards of the main economic history journals. These include The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard (Oxford, 1995/2003); The Gold Standard in Theory and History (with Barry Eichengreen, 1997); Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850-2000 (Routledge, 2003); The Making of Global Finance 1880-1913 (with Frédéric Zumer, OECD 2004); International Financial History in the Twentieth Century: System and Anarchy (with Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich and Harold James, Cambridge, 2004); and Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange. A Financial History of Victorian Science (Chicago, 2016). And Central Banks at a Crossroads. What Can We Learn from History? (with Michael D. Bordo, Øyvind Eitrheim & Jan F. Qvigstad, Cambridge 2016)

In 2019, he launched Capitalism, A Journal of Economics and History, a Penn journal, of which he is now founding editor.