Coinage debasements were a prevalent and generally very harmful feature of most economies in late-medieval western Europe, and most certainly in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482). Flanders also experienced several economic recessions or contractions from three related sources: warfare; the...

La période 1861-1896 est particulièrement mouvementée en Italie relativement à l'évolution du système financier, avec la sortie de l'étalon or (1866), les successions des régimes rélementaires des banques d'émission (1861-66, 1866-74, 1874-81, 1881-93), les crises boursières (1872-73,...

The renown or infamy of Henry VIII's Great Debasement (1542 - 1553), which the government of his successor, Edward VI, continued for another six years after his death, has unfairly obscured his earlier and far more modest coinage changes and public-spirited monetary policies. Furthermore,...

This article explores the determinants of price level fluctuations in Britain during the first suspension of the gold standard over the 1797-1821 period. I find that the contemporary price level was determined by world gold prices and expectations regarding the resumption of the gold standard at...

Across Europe and the Americas, the Enlightenment brought intellectual and institutional tumult over that most basic attribute of the political economy – its medium. By the time the age was over, money operated according to a new design. It enabled a set of financial practices that were...

This paper seeks to answer two questions: were the coinage debasements in Burgundian Flanders (1384-1482) undertaken principally as monetary or fiscal policies; and were they beneficial or harmful? In a recent monograph, Sargent and Velde (Big Problem of Small Change: 2002) contend that monetary...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

This paper is a critique of Michael Postan's famous Malthusian-Ricardo model demonstrating that late-medieval prices and wages were essentially determined by demographic factors, especially after the Black Death, while contending that monetary factors played no role in determining prices or...

This study analyses the impact of Protestantism on interest rates in England from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. One of many myths about the usury doctrine - the prohibition against demanding anything above the principal in a loan (mutuum) - is that it ceased to be observed in...

Coinage debasement in medieval and early modern Europe remains an ill-understood topic; and indeed an often cited article ("The Debasement Puzzle": Velde and Weber, 1996) sought to demonstrate that coinage debasements were both impractical and economically futile. The purpose of this study is to...