Coin Assaying and Commodity Money

Abstract

for helpful comments. Finally, we thank the audience at the ASSA meeting in New Orleans, the Bernoulli Center for Economics in Basel, the Cleveland FED, the European Workshop on Monetary Theory in Paris, the Symposium on Money and Banking in Strasbourg, the Southern Workshop in Macroeconomics in Auckland and the universities of Paris and Waikato. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and shall not be interpreted necessarily as those of the Banque de France, the Eurosystem or the OECD. All remaining errors are our own.† Banque de France, Pomone -Monetary policy studies division 41-1422, 31 rue Croix des Petits-Champs,

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“…This flood of precious metal is sometimes credited with causing a a worldwide inflation (Hamilton 1934) but its more lasting 3 Although prices did tend to adjust quickly in response to large wartime debasements; see also Rolnick, Velde, and Weber (1996). Why people chose to readily accept debased, clipped, or otherwise flawed coins has been a subject of theoretical investigations, including Velde, Weber, and Wright (1999), Bignon andDutu (2017), andBajaj (2019). 4 Before the discovery of the Potosí lode, the value of world gold production slightly exceeded that of silver production (Soetbeer 1876, 7).…”

Accounting for Debasements: Indivisibility or Imperfect Recognizability of Money

“…There is also related work on commodity money analyzing its features in a model of search and bargaining but not necessarily in the context of debasements. For example, Bignon and Dutu () model a similar private information problem to study the impact of both clipping and coin assaying on output and welfare. But, this paper is about determining conditions under which debasements can generate positive seigniorage and co‐circulation of coins.…”

Coin Sizes and Payments in Commodity Money Systems

“…These are the papers by Velde, Weber, and Wright (1999) and Bignon and Dutu (2007). However, these papers cannot fully analyze the issues with commodity money systems because they impose a unit upper bound on money holdings and only permit exchanges of coins for goods.…”