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Making Financial Markets: Contract Enforcement and the Emergence of Tradable Assets in Late Medieval Europe

Author

Listed:
  • Lars Boerner
  • Albrecht Ritschl

    (Economics Humboldt-University of Berlin)

Abstract

The emergence of medieval markets has been seen in the literature as hampered by lack of contract enforcement and institutions like merchants’ communal responsibil-ity. Merchants traveling to a different marketplace could be held liable for debts in-curred by any merchant from their hometown. We argue that communal responsibility was effective in enforcing credit contracts and enabled merchants to use bills of ex-change in long distance trade even if reputation effects were absent. We implement this in the Lagos and Wright (2005) matching model of money demand, assuming that preference shocks follow a two-state Markov chain. We derive conditions under which cash and credit in the anonymous matching market coexist. For fixed but suffi-ciently low cost of credit, agents will pay with cash in low-quality matches, and use cash and credit in high-quality matches. The use of credit reduces the money holdup in the matching market and thus leads to Pareto improvements

Suggested Citation

  • Lars Boerner & Albrecht Ritschl, 2006. "Making Financial Markets: Contract Enforcement and the Emergence of Tradable Assets in Late Medieval Europe," 2006 Meeting Papers 884, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed006:884
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ricardo Lagos & Randall Wright, 2005. "A Unified Framework for Monetary Theory and Policy Analysis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(3), pages 463-484, June.
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    3. Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro & Wright, Randall, 1989. "On Money as a Medium of Exchange," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(4), pages 927-954, August.
    4. Faig Miquel & Jerez Belén, 2006. "Inflation, Prices, and Information in Competitive Search," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1), pages 1-34, September.
    5. Greif, Avner, 1993. "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: the Maghribi Traders' Coalition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(3), pages 525-548, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Communal responsibility; matching; money demand; credit;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N2 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions
    • E41 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Demand for Money
    • D51 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Exchange and Production Economies

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