RECONSTRUCTION OF MONEY SUPPLY OVER THE LONG RUN: THE CASE OF ENGLAND, 1270-1870

by Nuno Palma (University of Manchester)

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This paper provides the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history.

It presents a baseline set of estimates, but also considers a variety of alternative plausible scenarios and provide several robustness checks. It concentrates on carefully setting out the details for the data construction, rather than on analysis, but the hope is that these new estimates – the longest such series ever assembled, for any country – will open new vistas to help us understand the complex interaction between the real and the monetary sides of the English economy, at both business-cycle and long-run frequencies. Many applications are possible; for instance, O’Brien and Palma (2016) use it in their analysis of the Restriction period (1797-1821). Furthermore, the new methodology set out here may serve as a blueprint for a similar reconstruction of coin and money supply series for other economies for which the analogous required data is available.

The paper proposes two new estimation methods. The first, referred to as the “direct method”, is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only. This method does not consider broader forms of money such as banknotes, deposits, inland bills of exchange, government tallies, exchequer paper or private tokens, which became increasingly important from the seventeenth century onwards. The second method is an “indirect method,” which relies on a combination of information about nominal GDP with the value of coin supply or M2 known at certain benchmark periods. This permits estimating the volume of a broader measure of money supply over time. Figure 1 shows the main results.

This paper is forthcoming in The Economic History Review (currently available in early view), and the underlying data has now been included by the Bank of England in their historical database.

To contact the author:
nuno.palma@manchester.ac.uk
@nunopgpalma