IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/wpaper/27874.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

After the Great Debasement, 1544-51: did Gresham’s Law apply?

Author

Listed:
  • Li, Ling-Fan

Abstract

In England, across the whole period of the Great Debasement, the mint issued six different kinds of silver coins and three kinds of gold coins. According to Gresham’s Law, coins with the same face value but different intrinsic values can not circulate side by side for too long: only those coins with lower intrinsic values stay in circulation; those with relatively high intrinsic values would be hoarded, exported, or melted down. Neither contemporary sources nor modern research about the disappearance of good money over this period has provided any solid quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of Gresham’s Law. This paper intends to produce such an assessment. For this purpose, two types of evidence are examined: the composition of the re-coinage of 1560, and the trend of the exchange rate. The result shows that contrary to popular belief, Gresham’s Law was rather ineffective in mid-sixteenth-century England.

Suggested Citation

  • Li, Ling-Fan, 2009. "After the Great Debasement, 1544-51: did Gresham’s Law apply?," Economic History Working Papers 27874, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:wpaper:27874
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27874/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rolnick, Arthur J & Weber, Warren E, 1986. "Gresham's Law or Gresham's Fallacy?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(1), pages 185-199, February.
    2. ANDREW M. WATSON & Jacques Coeur, 1967. "Back to Gold — and Silver," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 20(1), pages 1-34, April.
    3. François R. Velde & Warren E. Weber & Randall Wright, 1999. "A Model of Commodity Money, with Applications to Gresham's Law and the Debasement Puzzle," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 2(1), pages 291-323, January.
    4. Volckart, Oliver, 2008. "‘The big problem of the petty coins’, and how it could be solved in the late Middle Ages," Economic History Working Papers 22310, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    5. Gandal, Neil & Sussman, Nathan, 1997. "Asymmetric Information and Commodity Money: Tickling the Tolerance in Medieval France," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 29(4), pages 440-457, November.
    6. Selgin, George, 1996. "Salvaging Gresham's Law: The Good, the Bad, and the Illegal," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 28(4), pages 637-649, November.
    7. C. E. Challis, 1967. "The Debasement of the Coinage, 1542-1551," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 20(3), pages 441-455, December.
    8. George A. Akerlof, 1970. "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 84(3), pages 488-500.
    9. T. H. Lloyd, 2000. "Early Elizabethan investigations into exchange and the value of sterling, 1558-1568," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 53(1), pages 60-83, February.
    10. Greenfield, Robin L & Rockoff, Hugh, 1995. "Gresham's Law in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 27(4), pages 1086-1098, November.
    11. Lawrence Stone, 1949. "Elizabethan Overseas Trade," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 2(1), pages 30-58, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. John H. Munro, 2009. "Coinage and Monetary Policies in Burgundian Flanders during the late-medieval 'Bullion Famines',. 1384 - 1482," Working Papers tecipa-361, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    2. Isabel Schnabel & Hyun Song Shin, 2018. "Money and trust: lessons from the 1620s for money in the digital age," BIS Working Papers 698, Bank for International Settlements.
    3. Gary Pecquet & Clifford Thies, 2010. "Money in occupied New Orleans, 1862–1868: A test of Selgin’s “salvaging” of Gresham’s Law," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 23(2), pages 111-126, June.
    4. Li, Yiting, 2002. "Government transaction policy and Gresham's law," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 435-453, March.
    5. François R. Velde & Warren E. Weber & Randall Wright, 1999. "A Model of Commodity Money, with Applications to Gresham's Law and the Debasement Puzzle," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 2(1), pages 291-323, January.
    6. Ling-Fan Li, 2015. "Information asymmetry and the speed of adjustment: debasements in the mid-sixteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(4), pages 1203-1225, November.
    7. Bryan P Cutsinger & Vincent Geloso & Mathieu Bédard, 2022. "The wild card: colonial paper money in French North America, 1685 to 1719 [Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800]," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 26(2), pages 185-207.
    8. Benjamin Lester & Andrew Postlewaite & Randall Wright, 2011. "Information and Liquidity," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43, pages 355-377, October.
    9. Sussman, Nathan & Zeira, Joseph, 2003. "Commodity money inflation: theory and evidence from France in 1350-1436," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(8), pages 1769-1793, November.
    10. Bajaj, Ayushi, 2018. "Undefeated equilibria of the Shi–Trejos–Wright model under adverse selection," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 957-986.
    11. John H. Munro, 2012. "The Technology and Economics of Coinage Debasements in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: with special reference to the Low Countries and England," Working Papers tecipa-456, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    12. Easton, Steve, 2007. "Valuing coins as the sum of the underlying asset and a perpetual American put option," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 397-402, March.
    13. Wang, Zijian, 2020. "Liquidity and private information in asset markets: To signal or not to signal," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    14. Madison, Florian, 2024. "Asymmetric information in frictional markets for liquidity: Collateralized credit vs asset sale," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 159(C).
    15. Aleksander Berentsen & Guillaume Rocheteau, 2004. "Money and Information," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(4), pages 915-944.
    16. Robert E. Martin, 2011. "The College Cost Disease," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 14179.
    17. Jin, Gu & Zhu, Tao, 2019. "Debasements and Small Coins: An Untold Story of Commodity Money," MPRA Paper 93057, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Flandreau, Marc R, 2002. ""Water Seeks a Level": Modeling Bimetallic Exchange Rates and the Bimetallic Band," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 34(2), pages 491-519, May.
    19. Lawrence J. White, 2020. "Antitrust Economics And Consumer Protection Economics In Policy And Litigation: Why The Disparity?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 58(4), pages 1555-1564, October.
    20. Y. -Y. Kim, 2004. "Gresham's law in the late Chosun Korea," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(15), pages 979-984.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General
    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • O52 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Europe

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:wpaper:27874. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager on behalf of EH Dept. (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/chlseuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.