Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used to generate seigniorage in large parts of medieval Europe for around two centuries. When the...

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used to generate seigniorage in large parts of medieval Europe for around two centuries. When the...

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee at re-coinage worked as a monetary tax...

Archaeology and numismatics have long been familiar with the phenomenon of periodic re-coinage (renovatio monetae), which dominated monetary taxation in medieval Europe for almost 200 years. However, this form of monetary taxation is seldom, if ever, discussed in the literature of economics or...

The origins of monetary policy can be traced back to the days of the goldsmith-bankers when a reserve of gold coins was held by them to meet the promise stated on their bank notes: that they could be exchanged for gold. However, this covenant was doomed from the start, due to the avarice of...

A currency union is when several independent sovereign nations share a common currency. This has been a recurring phenomenon in monetary history. In this article I study the theoretical foundations of such unions, and discuss some important currency unions in history, most notably the case of...

A monetary system called periodic re-coinage was used during almost 200 years in large part of medieval Europe. Old coins were frequently declared invalid and had to be exchanged for new ones for an exchange fee. This system – which is equivalent to a Gesell tax – required a limited coin...

Gesell taxes on money have recently received attention as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such taxes were an important method for generating seigniorage in medieval Europe for around two centuries. When a Gesell tax was levied, current coins ceased...

Central banks can operate with negative equity, and many have done so in history without undermining trust in fiat money. However, there are limits. How negative can central bank equity be before fiat money loses credibility? We address this question using a global games approach motivated by...

Refet Gürkaynak, Brian Sack, and Eric Swanson (2005) provide empirical evidence that long forward nominal rates are overly sensitive to monetary policy shocks, and that this is consistent with a model where long-term inflation expectations are not anchored because agents must infer the central...