Money, States, and Empire: Financial Integration and Institutional Change in Central Europe, 1400–1520

Chilosi, David; Volckart, Oliver

doi:10.1017/s0022050711001914

Cited by 30 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…As financial integration was already known to be associated with the fall in information cost, (Chilosi and Volckart 2011) this thesis further connects the flow and quality of information to the speed of price adjustment. First, it uses monthly and weekly data in a medieval context and takes to a new level the quantitative analysis of late medieval financial markets.…”

Section: Bullion Bills and Arbitrage: Exchange Markets In Fourteentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

2014

J. Econ. Hist.

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This study establishes long-term trends in the purchasing power of the wages of unskilled workers and develops estimates for GDP per capita for medieval Egypt and Iraq. Wages were heavily influenced by two long-lasting demographic shocks, the Justinian Plague and the Black Death and the slow population recovery that followed. As a result, they remained above the subsistence minimum for most of the medieval era. We also argue that the environment of high wages that emerged after the Justinian Plague contributed to the Golden Age of Islam by creating demand for higher income goods.

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Section: Bullion Bills and Arbitrage: Exchange Markets In Fourteentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

2014

J. Econ. Hist.

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“…The third research theme has focused more specifically on financial, rather than goods, market integration. Much of this is based on the possibility for arbitrage between the nominal values of different coinages and their precious metal contents (Boerner and Volckart, 2011;Chilosi and Volckart, 2011). Transaction costs bands that precluded such arbitrage trading were around 7 per cent in Basel between 1365 and 1429 (Kugler, 2011) and still of the order of 6 per cent in sixteenth century Spain (Bernholz and Kugler, 2011).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Did Purchasing Power Parity Hold in Medieval Europe?

Bell

Brooks

Moore

2016

The Manchester School

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This paper employs a unique, hand‐collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing power parity held in Europe during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Using single series and panel unit root and stationarity tests and cointegration analysis on 10 real exchange rates between 1383 and 1411, we show that the parity relationship held for the pound sterling and some of the Florentine florin series individually and for almost all of the groups that we investigate. Our findings add to the weight of evidence that trading and arbitrage activities stopped real exchange rates deviating permanently from fair values. This research extends the results reported in other studies back more than 600 years.

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“…The question of how this kind of arbitrage affected the integration of Central European money markets in the late Middle Ages has recently been examined in detail by Chilosi and Volckart (2009). The authors used largely the same data as those utilised in the present study, focusing on the period between c. 1400 and 1520 and on the coefficient of variationi.e.…”

Section: Money and Money Markets In Late Medieval Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the fragmented source material and related information preserved for the period of investigation, make the costs of creating such a control group, and using these data in an empirically meaningful, way prohibitive. Using these data in order to calculate gold-silver ratios involves a number of problems and assumptions that need to be briefly discussed (for an extensive discussion see Chilosi and Volckart, 2009; for another application of this approach, Rosen, 1981). Exchange rates were based on several types of transactions, three of which are relevant here (cf.…”

Section: Exchange Rates Monetary Standards and Gold-silver Ratiosmentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of a common coinage: Currency unions and the integration of money markets in late Medieval Central Europe

Boerner

Volckart

2011

Explorations in Economic History

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This paper employs a new method and dataset to estimate the effect of currency unions on the integration of financial markets in late medieval Central Europe. The analysis reveals that membership in a union was significantly correlated with wellintegrated markets. We also examine whether currency unions were endogenous. Our results indicate that where unions were established, markets had been significantly better integrated already in the preceding period. In addition, we show that currency unions created by autonomous merchant towns were better integrated than unions implemented by territorial rulers. The overall implication is that monetary diversity was a corollary of weakly integrated markets in late medieval Central Europe. IntroductionIn the eighteenth century, the law lecturer and enlightened publicist Johann Stephan Pütter (1788: 451) claimed that Germany alone had more currencies than all the rest of Europe together. If this was true in the early modern period, it was all the more true in the late Middle Ages. In the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, around 500 mints were in operation (Sprenger, 2002, p. 81); the number of currencies was smaller but still large. How large it was is something that we cannot determine with any degree of precision, in particular as over time some currencies fell out of use while others emerged. However, an attempt to provide a rough estimate would produce, at least, approx. 70 different currencies, 1 many of which were used only in a few cities and their environs, while some had at least regional importance. 1In this paper, we consider how currency unions that were formed in Central Europe between the middle of the fourteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries affected the integration of money markets.Specifically, we ask if markets were better-integrated where consumers used the same silver currency, or if well-integrated markets were a precondition of the harmonisation of currencies supplied by several political authorities.There are several reasons why these issues are important and interesting. For one thing, given the generally low level of investment and the slow pace of technological progress before industrialisation, we can expect most growth that there was to have been Smithian growth (cf. Epstein, 2000, pp. 38 ff.; 2001, p. 34). This is why the economy of premodern Europe is increasingly being studied in the context of a 'commercialist' framework (e.g. Unger, 1983;Aloisio, 2007;Unger, 2007; Hatcher and Bailey, 2001, pp. 121 ff.;Persson, 1999 2 grain prices are relatively well documented. However, there are drawbacks to this approach. Grain prices were subject to violent seasonal fluctuations, and where at best a few price-observations per year existas is the case for most places before the sixteenth century -their informational content is limited. Also, as grain was a good with a high weight-value ratio, grain market integration was strongly affected by transport costs. To be sure, under a commodity money system transport costs of money were ...

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Money, States, and Empire: Financial Integration and Institutional Change in Central Europe, 1400–1520

Cited by 30 publications

References 36 publications

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

Did Purchasing Power Parity Hold in Medieval Europe?

The utility of a common coinage: Currency unions and the integration of money markets in late Medieval Central Europe

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