Communal Responsibility and the Coexistence of Money and Credit under Anonymous Matching

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a village economy version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model, agents trading anonymously in decentralized markets can be identified by their citizenship and thus be held liable for each other. Enforceability within each village's centralized afternoon market ensures collateralization of credit in decentralized markets. In the resulting equilibrium, money and credit coexist in decentralized markets if the use of credit is costly. Our analysis easily extends itself to other payment systems like credit cards that provide a group identity to otherwise anonymous agents.Communal responsibility, anonymous matching, money demand, credit, bills of exchange

Communal Responsibility and the Coexistence of Money and Credit Under Anonymous Matching

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a village economy version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model, agents trading anonymously in decentralized markets can be identified by their citizenship and thus be held liable for each other. Enforceability within each village's centralized afternoon market ensures collateralization of credit in decentralized markets. In the resulting equilibrium, money and credit coexist in decentralized markets if the use of credit is costly. Our analysis easily extends itself to other payment systems like credit cards that provide a group identity to otherwise anonymous agents.Communal responsibility, anonymous matching, money demand, credit, bills of exchange

Communal Responsibility and the Coexistence of Money and Credit Under Anonymous Matching

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a village economy version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model, agents trading anonymously in decentralized markets can be identified by their citizenship and thus be held liable for each other. Enforceability within each village's centralized afternoon market ensures collateralization of credit in decentralized markets. In the resulting equilibrium, money and credit coexist in decentralized markets if the use of credit is costly. Our analysis easily extends itself to other payment systems like credit cards that provide a group identity to otherwise anonymous agents.Communal responsibility, anonymous matching, money demand, credit, bills of exchange

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

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 improvementsCommunal responsibility, matching, money demand, credit

Anglo-Dutch premium auctions in eighteenth-century Amsterdam

An Anglo-Dutch premium auction consists of an English auction followed by a Dutch auction, with a cash premium paid to the winner of the first round. We study such auctions used in the secondary debt market in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. This was among the first uses of auctions, or any structured market-clearing mechanism, in a financial market. We find that this market presented two distinct challenges - generating competition and aggregating information. We argue that the Anglo-Dutch premium auction is particularly well-suited to do both. Modeling equilibrium play theoretically, we predict a positive relationship between the uncertainty in a security's value and the likelihood of a second-round bid. Analyzing data on 16,854 securities sold in the late 1700s, we find empirical support for this prediction. This suggests that bidding behavior may have been consistent with (non-cooperative) equilibrium play, and therefore that these auctions were successful at generating competition. We also find evidence suggesting that these auctions succeeded at aggregating information. Thus, the Anglo-Dutch premium auction appears to have been an effective solution to a complex early market design problem

Time for growth

This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid en- dogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with two sets of instru- ments: distance from the first adopters and the appearance of repeated solar eclipses. The latter instrument is motivated by the predecessor technologies of mechanical clocks, astronomic instru- ments that measured the course of heavenly bodies. We find significant growth rates between 1500 and 1700 in the range of 30 percentage points in early adoptor cities and areas

Epidemic trade

This paper uses the spread of disease as a proxy to measure economic interactions. Based on a case study of the Black Death (1346-51) in the Mediterranean region and Europe, we find geographic, institutional, and cultural determinants of trade. To achieve this we create and empirically test a trade model between cities. Our findings allow us to create a new methodology to measure economic interaction and shed light on open questions in economics, especially pertaining to trade, economic history, and growt

Mechanical clocks prove the importance of technology for economic growth

They also show the 'productivity paradox': it can take generations for the full benefits of tech to become evident, write Lars Boerner and Battista Severgnin

Medieval matching markets

We study the implementation of brokerage regulations as allocation mechanisms in wholesale markets in pre-modern Central Western Europe. We assemble a data set of 1609 sets of brokerage rules from 70 cities. We analyze the incentives created by the rules that were implemented, compare cities that implemented brokerage to cities that did not, and analyze the choice of how brokers should be compensated and the effect this has on market outcomes. Empirically, we find that larger cities, cities with trade-geographic advantages, cities with merchant interests, and cities with universities were more likely to implement brokerage. We also find that brokers were more likely to be compensated with price-based fees in markets with greater heterogeneity in products and preferences, and with unit fees in markets for more homogeneous products – exactly as our theoretical analysis suggests is optimal

A Time to Print, a Time to Reform

The public mechanical clock and movable type printing press were arguably the most important and complex technologies of the late medieval period. We posit that towns with clocks became upper-tail human capital hubs--clocks required extensive technical know-how and fine mechanical skill. This meant that clock towns were in position to adopt the printing press soon after its invention in 1450, as presses required a similar set of mechanical and technical skills to operate and repair. A two-stage analysis confirms this conjecture: we find that clock towns were 34-40 percentage points more likely to also have a press by 1500. The press, in turn, helped facilitate the spread of the Protestant Reformation. A three-stage instrumental variables analysis indicates that the press influenced the adoption of Protestantism, while the clock\u27s effect on the Reformation was mostly indirect. Our analysis therefore suggests that the mechanical clock was responsible--directly and indirectly--for two of the most important movements in the making of the modern world: the spread of printing and the Reformation