How do small states choose their exchange rate regimes? This is the question addressed by Tobias Straumann in his recent book, Fixed Ideas of Money. The purpose of the book is to provide a new perspective on the often forgotten monetary history of small European countries from the disorder that followed World War I to the advent of the euro. European monetary history is often presented from the perspective of the large states but, as Straumann convincingly argues, their constraints are very different from those of small countries. Moreover, although many papers have studied the individual trajectories of small states, few attempts have been made so far to analyse them in a unified way. This big picture of the small countries is the great contribution of this book.
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