Duplication without Constraints: Alvarez Nogal and Chamley’s Analysis of Debt Policy under Philip II

Carlos Alvarez-Nogal and Christophe Chamley (henceforth AC) recently published a paper in the Economic History Review on “Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers”. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before AC’s original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (Section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what AC present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (Section II). Finally, AC misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (Section III).