Thursday , March 28 2024
Home / Dirk Niepelt / The Value of Monetary Units, 1500–1914

The Value of Monetary Units, 1500–1914

Summary:
K. Kıvanç Karaman, ¸Sevket Pamuk, Seçil Yıldırım-Karaman (2020), Money and monetary stability in Europe, 1300–1914, Journal of Monetary Economics (115). At one extreme, the Dutch Republic depreciated its monetary unit by about 2.3 times, at the other, the Ottomans depreciated by about 25,000 times. These two numbers correspond to average annual depreciation rates of 0.2 and 2.5% respectively, with the other states falling in-between. … depreciations tended to be episodic. In particular, long periods of constant silver and gold value alternated with episodes of rapid depreciation in consecutive years. … There were also instances of one-off depreciations, but they were few, and at low rates. … monetary stability was not an elusive objective. Some states stabilized their monetary unit

Topics:
Dirk Niepelt considers the following as important: , , , , ,

This could be interesting, too:

Dirk Niepelt writes SNB Annual Report

Dirk Niepelt writes Banks and Privacy, U.S. vs Canada

Dirk Niepelt writes Bank of England CBDC Academic Advisory Group

Dirk Niepelt writes Panel on “Will the digital euro take off?,” CEPR, 2023

K. Kıvanç Karaman, ¸Sevket Pamuk, Seçil Yıldırım-Karaman (2020), Money and monetary stability in Europe, 1300–1914, Journal of Monetary Economics (115).

The Value of Monetary Units, 1500–1914

At one extreme, the Dutch Republic depreciated its monetary unit by about 2.3 times, at the other, the Ottomans depreciated by about 25,000 times. These two numbers correspond to average annual depreciation rates of 0.2 and 2.5% respectively, with the other states falling in-between. … depreciations tended to be episodic. In particular, long periods of constant silver and gold value alternated with episodes of rapid depreciation in consecutive years. … There were also instances of one-off depreciations, but they were few, and at low rates. … monetary stability was not an elusive objective. Some states stabilized their monetary unit early. England did so by the mid-16th century, except for the fiat standard episode during the Napoleonic wars. Dutch Republic stabilized its monetary unit in the early 17th century, with very minor changes in the centuries that followed. France stabilized its monetary unit in 1795 following the fiat money experiment of the Revolution. In contrast to these western European states, in southern and eastern Europe, states continued to depreciate their monetary units until the end of the period.

Dirk Niepelt
Dirk Niepelt is Director of the Study Center Gerzensee and Professor at the University of Bern. A research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), CESifo (Munich) research network member and member of the macroeconomic committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, he served on the board of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics and was an invited professor at the University of Lausanne as well as a visiting professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *