Take the Money and Don’t Run?

Benefits of empire? Capital market integration north and south of the Alps, 1350-1800

by

David Chilosi (London School of Economics d.chilosi@lse.ac.uk)

Max-Stephan Schulze (London School of Economics m.s.schulze@lse.ac.uk)

Oliver Volckart  (London School of Economics o.j.volckart@lse.ac.uk)

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses two questions. First, when and to what extent did capital markets integrate north and south of the Alps? Second, how mobile was capital? Analysing a unique new dataset on pre-modern urban annuities, we find that northern markets were consistently better integrated than Italian markets. Long-term integration was driven by initially peripheral places in the Netherlands and Upper Germany integrating with the rest of the Holy Roman Empire where the distance and volume of inter-urban investments grew primarily in the sixteenth century. The institutions of the Empire contributed to stronger market integration north of the Alps.

URL: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ehlwpaper/65346.htm

Distributed by NEP-HIS on  2016‒02‒29

Review by Anna Missiaia

The work by Chilosi, Schulze and Volckart deals with a fundamental issue in European economic history, namely ascertaining the level of capital market integration in different parts of the continent at a specific moment in time. The areas of interest in this case are Italy and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. The aim is to test whether the Italian cities, that are often considered the front runners of modern finance in the medieval times, where enjoying a greater level of financial market integration compared to the cities that were part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The paper uses an impressive collection of some 30,000 interest rate records from 103 cities located both north and south of the Alps. The time span is 1350-1800, providing a very long run picture of the starting levels and evolution of the capital markets in pre-industrial times. The authors use nominal interest rate spreads across cities to assess the level of market integration. This is a standard procedure often used with price series and goes back to the concept of the law of one price: if two markets are well integrated, price (interest rates) differentials will merely reflect transport and other trade costs such as tariffs between the two markets, leaving no space for arbitrage.

The main result of the paper is that although Italy and the Holy Roman Empire started from similar levels of interest rate spread at the beginning of the period, they had very different dynamics. Capital markets in the Holy Roman Empire experienced an accumulated reduction in spreads during the period considered while the ones in Italy experienced an increase (-6 vs. +2.55 when perpetuities are compared).

The authors make an interesting case that the divergence observed is led by long-distance integration within the Empire. They do so by separating all the possible pairs that originate the spreads into two groups: those under 200 km of distance and those above. They find that the integration in the second group increased twice as fast compared to the first. The authors place this convergence of long-distance  and short distance integration between 1500 and 1630.

The next step in the analysis is to study whether the integration was occurring between or within regions of the Empire. Using cluster analysis, the authors show that the Empire appeared as a “polycentic network” with several interconnected financial centers (such as Frankfurt, Leipzig, Nurmberg and Hamburg). These were developing in parallel in spite of the large distances between them. The evidence points to increased integration between rather than within clusters, opening the way to a fascinating discussion on the causes of this divergence between the Empire and Italy.

 

                                             The imperial eagle

So why did the regions north of the Alps were able to achieve greater capital market integration in spite of less favorable geographic conditions (scarce access to sea) and a lower level of financial technology? According to Chilosi, Schulze and Volckart, the key factor lays into the different institutions that the two regions developed. Local authorities in Italy restricted the participation of foreigners to the capital markets and foreign investment was more costly than local. Quite differently, within the Empire foreign investment was favoured by several means: legal systems were much more similar within the Empire and collective liability was widespread. Moreover, the local authorities competed for capital, pushing them to increase the protection of foreign investors.  The authors however are careful in stating that the Imperial institutions were the sole promoters of the integration. They are more inclined to grant them an indirect effect through the promotion of peace and the moderation of interstate rivalries. The lack of such institutions in Italy led on the other hand to much more fragmented capital markets.

This paper is very relevant for the current debate in many ways. It primarily addresses an issue that is fundamental to explain the very different economic development trajectories of two European regions that in medieval times had reversed positions, with the Italian city states forging ahead. The papers also uses a data set that is impressive both in its size and in its temporal extension, making the results very convincing from an empirical point of view. The discussion of the role of institutions in promoting exchange and therefore economic development is a classic one that goes back for instance to the work of Greif (2006) and Ogilvie (2011).

A step that would take the debate further would be to focus more on the Italian institutions, which in this paper seem to be somehow neglected compared to the imperial ones. In particular, it would be interesting to study whether all the Italian city states had institutions that were equally detrimental for capital market integration. If, for instance, northern Italian cities, having been part of the early Empire, had institutions that were more similar to the imperial ones, this could bring some insights into the different performance of the South in the 19th century and beyond. Such analysis could be useful in the debate on regional disparities in Italy and their determinants (for recent contributions see Daniele and Malanima, 2011 and Felice, 2015).

References

Daniele V. and P. Malanima (2011). Il divario Nord-Sud in Italia 1861-2011. Rubbettino (Soveria Mannelli).

Felice, E. (2015). Ascesa e declino. Storia economica d’Italia. Il Mulino (Bologna).

Greif, A. (2006). Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. Lessons from Medieval Trade. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge).

Ogilvie, S. (2011). Institutions and European Trade. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge).

 

Coinucopia: Dealing with Multiple Currencies in the Medieval Low Countries

Enter the ghost: cashless payments in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1800

by Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker (both at Utrecht University)

Abstract: We analyze the evolution of payments in the Low Countries during the period 1500-1800 to argue for the historical importance of money of account or ghost money. Aided by the adoption of new bookkeeping practices such as ledgers with current accounts, this convention spread throughout the entire area from the 14th century onwards. Ghost money eliminated most of the problems associated with paying cash by enabling people to settle transactions in a fictional currency accepted by everyone. As a result two functions of money, standard of value and means of settlement, penetrated easily, leaving the third one, store of wealth, to whatever gold and silver coins available. When merchants used ghost money to record credit granted to counterparts, they in effect created a form of money which in modern terms might count as M1. Since this happened on a very large scale, we should reconsider our notions about the volume of money in circulation during the Early Modern Era.

URL: https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucg/wpaper/0074.html

Distributed by NEP-HIS on: 2015-11-21

Review by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo

In a recent contribution to the Payments Journal, Mira Howard noted:

It’s no secret that the payments industry has been undergoing a period of enormous growth and innovation. Payments has transformed from a steadfast, predictable industry to one with solutions so advanced they sound futuristic. Inventions such as selfie-pay, contactless payments, crypto currency, and biotechnology are just examples of the incredible solutions coming out of the payments industry. However, many payments companies are so anxious to deliver “the future” to merchants and consumers that they overlook merchants that are still stuck using outdated technologies.

The paper by Gelderblom and Jonker is timely and talks to the contemporary concerns of Mira Howard by reminding us of the long history of innovation in retail payments. Specifically, the past and (in their view) under appreciated use of ledger technology (you may want to read its current application behind Bitcoin inThe Economist Insights).

Gelderblom and Jonker set out to explain high economic growth in the Low Countries during the 17th and 18th centuries in a context of scarce media to pay by cash given low coinage, recurrent debasements and devaluations. Their argument is that scarcity of cash did not force people to use credit. Instead silver and gold coins were used as a store of value while daily transactions were recorded in ledgers while translated into a “fictional” currency (“a fictive currency, money of account or ghost money”, p. 7). This provided a common denominator in the use of different types of coin. For instance they cite a merchant house in Leiden transacting in 28 different coin types.

Gelderblom and Jonker build their argument using different sources including a re-examination of relevant literature, probates and merchant accounts. Together they build a fascinating and thought provoking mosaic of the financial aspects everyday life in the Early Modern age. One can only praise Gelderblom and Jonker for their detail treatment of these sources, including a balanced discussion on the potential limitations and bias they could introduce to their study (notably their discussion on probate data).

Comment

The use of a unit of account in a ledger to deal with multiple currencies was by no means unique to the Low Countries nor to the Medieval period. For instance, early Medieval accounting records of the Cathedral of Seville followed the standard practice of keeping track of donations using “maravadies” while 19th century Kuwaiti merchant arithmetic of trade across the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf was expressed in Indian rupees [1]. Gelderblom and Jonker, however, go a step beyond using trends in probate data to explore whether there was widespread use of credit and also, extant literature to determine the scarcity of different coins and precious metals.

As part of their arguments Gelderblom and Jonker also question the “efficiency” of the so called “stage theory of money”. This echoes calls that for some time economic anthropologist have made, as they have provided empirical support questioning notion of the barter economy prior to the emergence of money and thus pointing to the illusion of the “coincidence of and wants” (for a quick read see The Atlantic on The Myth of the Barter Economy and for an in depth discussion see Bell, 2001). The same sources agree that the Middle Ages was a second period of demonetization. Moreover, systems of weight and measures, both being per-conditions for barter, were in place by the Early Modern period in Europe then a barter or credit economy rather than the gift economy that characterized pre-monetary societies was a possible response to the scarcity of cash. Gelderblom and Jonker provide evidence to reject the idea of a credit economy while conclude that “barter was probably already monetized” (p. 18) and therefore

“we need to abandon the stage theory of monetization progressing from barter via chas to credit because it simply does not work. … we need to pus the arguments of Muldrew, Vickers, and Kuroda further and start appreciating the social dimensions of payments”.(pp. 18-19)

I could not agree more and so would, I presume, Georg Simmel, Bill Maurer, Viviana Zelizer, Yuval Millo and many others currently working around the sociology of finance and the anthropology of money.

References and Notes

Bell, Stephanie. 2001. “The Role of the State in the Hierarchy of Money.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25 (149-163).

[1] Many thanks to Julian Borreguero (Seville) and Madihah Alfadhli (Bangor) for their comments.