The influence of information costs on the integration of financial markets: Northern Europe, 1350-1560

Oliver Volckart

No 2006-049, SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk

Abstract: In this paper, the influence of information costs on the integration of Northern European financial markets between ca. 1350 and 1560 is explored. The approach is based on splitting information costs into their constitutive components and on measuring one of these, i.e. the costs of transmitting information, which have particular importance for market integration. The analysis has two main results: First, under pre-industrial conditions, when transmitting information was extremely labour intensive and very little capital intensive, transmission costs can be largely identified with labour costs, and were subject to the same influences. Next, the integration of financial markets depended crucially on the level of transmission costs, high costs being strongly and significantly correlated with weak integration, while lower costs favoured convergence.

Keywords: Financial markets; integration; information costs; economic history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 F31 F36 N24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/25132/1/518431819.PDF (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:sfb649:sfb649dp2006-049

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().