Contemporaries, and economic historians, have noted several features of medieval and early modern European monetary systems that are hard to analyze using models of centralized exchange. For example, contemporaries complained of recurrent shortages of small change and argued that an...

In this note I review evidence suggesting that shortages of small change occurred in the territory of Argentina during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For the colonial period (until 1810) the main pieces of evidence are: (i) the widespread use of informal...

By adding denominations to their coin and banknote series central banks can increase the efficiency of cash payments. In practice, however, they opt for a denominational structure with a relatively low density. The literature holds that this is because of the production costs involved. To test...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

A crisis is but a crisis when the long run outlook is definitively positive. Then a lower turning point must exist. This implicates a vision or, in the ideal case, a formalized theory of the money economy's possible end states. This theory has to provide an endogenous explanation of end states...

We set out a simple four sector macro model of the economy of the Roman Empire during a period of considerable economic prosperity. Our focus is on gold coins as currency and the seignorage which the government used to fund its activities. We solve numerically for a balanced growth...

The first attempt in the human history to consciously create money ended in a collapse in 1720, well-known as the money mania. This unfortunate start raises doubt on money creation as a whole such that today there are still voices questioning created money even though it is now indispensible for...

Money has been a part of human history for almost 3,000 years. Despite this, there is still no universal understanding of the ontological nature of money. In this paper, a new approach to the understanding of non-commodity money is proposed. Proceeding from the premise that money is a purely...