Eichengreen has done research and published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system.

His best known work is the book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, Oxford University Press, 1992.

In his own book on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke summarized Eichengreen's thesis as follows: ... [T]he proximate cause of the world depression was a structurally flawed and poorly managed international gold standard... For a variety of reasons, including among others a desire of the Federal Reserve to curb the US stock market boom, monetary policy in several major countries turned contractionary in the late 1920s—a contraction that was transmitted worldwide by the gold standard.

What was initially a mild deflationary process began to snowball when the banking and currency crises of 1931 instigated an international "scramble for gold".

In addition to this, he is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2003.