Showing 1 - 8 of 8
This paper is a critique of Michael Postan's famous Malthusian-Ricardo model demonstrating that late-medieval prices and wages were essentially determined by demographic factors, especially after the Black Death, while contending that monetary factors played no role in determining prices or...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010575181
In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005704755
One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005055486
The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005616988
The objectives of this study are three-fold. The first is to rebut Charles Kindleberger’s famous dictum that usury ‘belongs less to economic history than to the history of ideas’; and in particular to demonstrate that the resuscitation of the anti-usury campaign from the early 13th century...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005617005
Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Labourer’, is the very troubling issue of ‘wage-stickiness’. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed ‘Golden Age’...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005835789
This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005837276
One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005827233