François R Velde
Biographic Data
| ID | 1454562 |
|---|---|
| NAME | François R Velde |
| GIVEN NAMES | François R |
| FAMILY NAME | Velde |
| SIGNATURE | VELDE F R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2204-0938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The French Public Debt in the Nineteenth Century
In this article I review the history of French public debt during the "long" nineteenth century, from Napoleon Bonaparte's accession to power in 1800 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.I discuss the size of the debt, its evolution in relation to government surpluses, the array of financial instruments, and the main methods of debt management used by the French state.The salient facts are the following: In 1802 the public debt was 10% of gross…
Impunity and Capitalism
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in a deep recession and millions of jobs lost, and, in some countries, the lost output has never been caught up. This was not the result of an extraneous event like a hurricane or an earthquake: It was manmade, with its epicenter in the banking sector and transmitted through financial markets. Our natural urge to deal with disasters assigns blame to human actors, and we may wish to punish them for the s…
Tax Erosion in Seventeenth-Century Naples
Writing in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) studied tax erosion and proposed remedies that he promised would "transform a harm into a benefit." The factual evolution of tax revenues and prices under the monetary and fiscal systems of his time confirms his diagnosis. A simple model built on his assumptions shows how clipping produces tax erosion in a commodity money system, and it illustrates how Campanel…
What Happened to the U.S. Economy during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? A View Through High-Frequency Data
An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators with time series methods and structural…
Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics
Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics
We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This area has been largely unaffected by the so-called new econometric methods that seek to prove causality in reduced form settings. We discuss why historica…
Early Public Banks I
This chapter explores the origins and development of models for a central bank by examining the history of the pre-Napoleonic-era public banks. Unlike central banks, some of these public banks were not owned by governments, and many did not function as ‘central banks’ in the sense of having a monopoly of control over a nation’s monetary base. They did share a common characteristic: the ability to create a privileged set of claims (ledger money or…
Big Problem of Small Change
Chronicle of a Deflation Unforetold
Suppose that the nominal money supply could be cut literally overnight. What would happen to prices, wages, and output? Such an experiment was carried out three times in France in 1724, resulting in a cumulative 45 percent cut. Prices adjusted instantaneously and fully on the foreign exchange market. Prices of commodities and of manufactured goods and industrial wages fell slowly, over many months, and not by the full amount of the nominal reduct…
Following the Yellow Brick Road
The Big Problem of Small Change
The Big Problem of Small Change offers the first credible and analytically sound explanation of how a problem that dogged monetary authorities for hundreds of years was finally solved. Two leading economists, Thomas Sargent and François Velde, examine the evolution of Western European economies through the lens of one of the classic problems of monetary history--the recurring scarcity and depreciation of small change. Through penetrating and clea…
A Model of Bimetallism
Bimetallism has been the subject of considerable debate: Was it a viable monetary system? Was it desirable? In our model, the amounts of each metal are split between coined metal, satisfying a cash-in-advance constraint, and uncoined metal, yielding utility. The ratio of the monies in the cash-in-advance constraint is endogenous. Bimetallism is feasible: we find a continuum of steady states indexed by the constant exchange rate of the monies. Bim…
The Debasement Puzzle
We establish several facts about medieval monetary debasements: they were followed by unusually large minting volumes and by increased seigniorage; old and new coins circulated concurrently; and, at least some of the time, coins were valued by weight. These facts constitute a puzzle because debasements provide no additional inducements to bring coins to the mint. On theoretical and empirical grounds, we reject explanations based on by-tale circul…
Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution
This paper describes aspects of the French Revolution from the perspective of theories about money and government budget constraints. The authors describe how unpleasant fiscal arithmetic gripped the Old Regime, how the Estates General responded to reorganize France's fiscal affairs, and how fiscal exigencies impelled the Revolution into a procession of monetary experiments ending in hyperinflation. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press
The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746-1793
This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borr…
Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution
This paper describes aspects of the French Revolution from the perspective of theories about money and government budget constraints. The authors describe how unpleasant fiscal arithmetic gripped the Old Regime, how the Estates General responded to reorganize France's fiscal affairs, and how fiscal exigencies impelled the Revolution into a procession of monetary experiments ending in hyperinflation. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press
The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746-1793
This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borr…
A Model of Bimetallism
Bimetallism has been the subject of considerable debate: Was it a viable monetary system? Was it desirable? In our model, the amounts of each metal are split between coined metal, satisfying a cash-in-advance constraint, and uncoined metal, yielding utility. The ratio of the monies in the cash-in-advance constraint is endogenous. Bimetallism is feasible: we find a continuum of steady states indexed by the constant exchange rate of the monies. Bim…
Chronicle of a Deflation Unforetold
Suppose that the nominal money supply could be cut literally overnight. What would happen to prices, wages, and output? Such an experiment was carried out three times in France in 1724, resulting in a cumulative 45 percent cut. Prices adjusted instantaneously and fully on the foreign exchange market. Prices of commodities and of manufactured goods and industrial wages fell slowly, over many months, and not by the full amount of the nominal reduct…
What Happened to the U.S. Economy during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? A View Through High-Frequency Data
An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators with time series methods and structural…
The Debasement Puzzle
We establish several facts about medieval monetary debasements: they were followed by unusually large minting volumes and by increased seigniorage; old and new coins circulated concurrently; and, at least some of the time, coins were valued by weight. These facts constitute a puzzle because debasements provide no additional inducements to bring coins to the mint. On theoretical and empirical grounds, we reject explanations based on by-tale circul…
The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746-1793
This article offers a new quantitative history of the market for government debt in France before the Revolution. The monarchy was a persistent default risk because of institutional obstacles to raising taxes. Default followed observable rules in targeting specific assets. The financial market reflected both facts: interest rates were high on the safest assets and ranged higher on the most likely default targets. The cost of all forms of new borr…
Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution
This paper describes aspects of the French Revolution from the perspective of theories about money and government budget constraints. The authors describe how unpleasant fiscal arithmetic gripped the Old Regime, how the Estates General responded to reorganize France's fiscal affairs, and how fiscal exigencies impelled the Revolution into a procession of monetary experiments ending in hyperinflation. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press
The Debasement Puzzle
We establish several facts about medieval monetary debasements: they were followed by unusually large minting volumes and by increased seigniorage; old and new coins circulated concurrently; and, at least some of the time, coins were valued by weight. These facts constitute a puzzle because debasements provide no additional inducements to bring coins to the mint. On theoretical and empirical grounds, we reject explanations based on by-tale circul…
A Model of Bimetallism
Bimetallism has been the subject of considerable debate: Was it a viable monetary system? Was it desirable? In our model, the amounts of each metal are split between coined metal, satisfying a cash-in-advance constraint, and uncoined metal, yielding utility. The ratio of the monies in the cash-in-advance constraint is endogenous. Bimetallism is feasible: we find a continuum of steady states indexed by the constant exchange rate of the monies. Bim…
The Big Problem of Small Change
The Big Problem of Small Change offers the first credible and analytically sound explanation of how a problem that dogged monetary authorities for hundreds of years was finally solved. Two leading economists, Thomas Sargent and François Velde, examine the evolution of Western European economies through the lens of one of the classic problems of monetary history--the recurring scarcity and depreciation of small change. Through penetrating and clea…
Following the Yellow Brick Road
Chronicle of a Deflation Unforetold
Suppose that the nominal money supply could be cut literally overnight. What would happen to prices, wages, and output? Such an experiment was carried out three times in France in 1724, resulting in a cumulative 45 percent cut. Prices adjusted instantaneously and fully on the foreign exchange market. Prices of commodities and of manufactured goods and industrial wages fell slowly, over many months, and not by the full amount of the nominal reduct…
Big Problem of Small Change
Early Public Banks I
This chapter explores the origins and development of models for a central bank by examining the history of the pre-Napoleonic-era public banks. Unlike central banks, some of these public banks were not owned by governments, and many did not function as ‘central banks’ in the sense of having a monopoly of control over a nation’s monetary base. They did share a common characteristic: the ability to create a privileged set of claims (ledger money or…
Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics
Money, Banking, and Old-School Historical Economics
We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This area has been largely unaffected by the so-called new econometric methods that seek to prove causality in reduced form settings. We discuss why historica…
What Happened to the U.S. Economy during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? A View Through High-Frequency Data
An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators with time series methods and structural…
Tax Erosion in Seventeenth-Century Naples
Writing in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) studied tax erosion and proposed remedies that he promised would "transform a harm into a benefit." The factual evolution of tax revenues and prices under the monetary and fiscal systems of his time confirms his diagnosis. A simple model built on his assumptions shows how clipping produces tax erosion in a commodity money system, and it illustrates how Campanel…
The French Public Debt in the Nineteenth Century
In this article I review the history of French public debt during the "long" nineteenth century, from Napoleon Bonaparte's accession to power in 1800 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.I discuss the size of the debt, its evolution in relation to government surpluses, the array of financial instruments, and the main methods of debt management used by the French state.The salient facts are the following: In 1802 the public debt was 10% of gross…
Impunity and Capitalism
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in a deep recession and millions of jobs lost, and, in some countries, the lost output has never been caught up. This was not the result of an extraneous event like a hurricane or an earthquake: It was manmade, with its epicenter in the banking sector and transmitted through financial markets. Our natural urge to deal with disasters assigns blame to human actors, and we may wish to punish them for the s…
Economics (12 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (8 works) · Monetary economics (6 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (4 works) · Financial system (4 works) · Keynesian economics (4 works) · Macroeconomics (4 works) · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact (4 works) · Business (3 works) · Debt (3 works)