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New Estimates of the Money Stock in France, 1493–1680

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Debra Glassman  and
Angela Redish
Debra Glassman
Affiliation:
The authors are Assistant Professors of Economics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Y2. They thank K. White, R. Shearer, J. Munro, C. K. Harley, D. Donaldson, the editors, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and C. Chuma for research assistance.
Angela Redish
Affiliation:
The authors are Assistant Professors of Economics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Y2. They thank K. White, R. Shearer, J. Munro, C. K. Harley, D. Donaldson, the editors, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and C. Chuma for research assistance.
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Abstract

The money stock in France from 1493 to 1680 has not been well understood. Changes in the money stock have usually been represented by moving sums of annual mint output. Mint output, however, included large amounts of recoinage, resulting in double-counting. A model of mint output is estimated to determine the amount of recoinage. The money stock estimates are also improved by incorporating a constant rate of loss of coins.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 31 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 Spooner, Frank C., The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 307–9.Google Scholar

2 The importance of bills of exchange, full-bodied money, and black money in the monetary circulation of sixteenth-century France is described in Meuvret, Jean, “Monetary Circulation and the Use of Coinage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France,” translated by Doran, Patrick, in Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1974).Google Scholar

3 Munro, John H., “Monetary Contraction and Industrial Change in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 1335–1500,” in Mayhew, N. J., ed., Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500) (Oxford, 1979). It is of course well known that by the eighteenth century bimetallic arbitrage was significant.Google Scholar

4 The livre tournois was the French money of account. It was subdivided into 20 sols, each of which was equal to 12 deniers.Google Scholar

5 Spooner, The International Economy, pp. 334–41.Google Scholar

6 The mint price data are from de Wailly, Natalis, Mémoire sur les Variations de la Livre Tournois depuis la Régne de Saint Louis jusqu' à l' Etablissement de la Monnaie Décimale (Paris, 1857), pp. 79–81, 173–75.Google Scholar

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8 To ensure that a fixed number of grains is contained in a particular coin, coins with the same name but different specie metal content are distinguished by a following letter: for example, the teston minted between 1488 and 1521 is called the teston-a.Google Scholar

9 Data on fineness and weight are from Kelly, P., The Universal Cambist (London, 1831);Google Scholar and Gadoury, V. and Droulers, F., Monnaies Royales Francaises (n.p., 1978).Google Scholar

10 Gould, J. D., The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1970), p. 11.Google Scholar

11 Gold coins frequently circulated at values above their official value. For example, in 1628 the gold écu au soleil circulated at 80 sols, although its official value was 75 sols. Similarly in 1634 the silver quart d'écu circulated at 17 and 18 sols, although its official value was only 16 sols. Spooner, The International Economy, p. 179.Google Scholar

12 See Gadoury and Droulers, Monnaies Royales, p. 36, for a discussion of the demonetization of the franc and p. 129 for the quart d'écu.Google Scholar

13 See Gadoury and Droulers, Monnaies Royales, p. 259; and Spooner, The International Economy, p. 194.Google Scholar

14 The data are from Mar, Alexander Del, Money and Civilization (London, 1886);Google ScholarShaw, W. A., The History of Currency 1252–1896 (1896; reprinted New York, 1967);Google ScholarSoetbeer, A., Edelmetali Produkzion und Werthverhältniss zwischen Gold und Silber seit der Entdeckung Amerika's bis Gegenwart (Gotha, 1979);Google Scholar and Tooke, T. and Newmarch, W., A History of Prices and the State of the Circulation (London, 1857), vol. 6. A gold-silver ratio can be calculated as either the ratio of mint prices or the ratio of mint equivalents. The appropriate comparison when deciding which metal to use in settling a trade debt is the difference between the mint price ratio in the country receiving the metal and the mint equivalent ratio in the country exporting the metal. Since we are interested in imports of specie metal to France, all these explanatory variables should take the form of the French mint price ratio minus the foreign mint equivalent ratio. It is unclear from the source (Shaw, History of Currency) whether the ratio for venice is the mint price or the mint equivalent ratio.Google Scholar

15 Some of the unexplained variation in the mint output equations may be due to minting of tax revenues that were collected in unminted metal. Since tax revenues are unrelated to the economic incentive variables included in the model, the omission of such a variable would not bias the coefficient estimates.Google Scholar

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17 As noted above, this may include some recoinage of underweight domestic coins. While the exact amount is unknown, it was apparently relatively small and is therefore ignored in later calculations.Google Scholar

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23 These estimates were obtained by running Tobit regressions of billon and copper mint output on dummy variables for the recoinage years (1550/52 for billon, 1654/56 for copper; see Spooner, The International Economy, pp. 140, 189). The independent variables from the gold and silver equations were not included in these regressions since billon and copper mint output responded to different incentives.Google Scholar

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