Velde asks what happens to prices, wages, and output when the nominal money supply is cut literally overnight, and finds a real-world natural experiment in 1720s France, where the government …
Online FirstJournal of Money, Credit and BankingOnline 4 Jun 2026
This paper applies a multiple-denomination commodity money model — building on Lee, Wallace, and Zhu (2005) — to coinage episodes in late medieval England, and derives two main findings. Shortages of …
In 1716-1720, John Law restructured French public finance by converting most of the government's debt into equity in a trading-and-tax-farming conglomerate and replacing silver coin with paper money; …
Interpreting the French Revolution through the lens of government-budget-constraint theory, this paper traces how a pre-1789 fiscal crisis, the assignat's evolution from tax-backed money into fiat …
PublishedQuarterly Journal of EconomicsOnline 26 Dec 2024Published Apr 2025
When did sustained productivity growth begin in England? This paper constructs new estimates of the evolution of productivity in England from 1250 to 1870, with the goal of both dating the onset of …