Mining Gold For The Currency During The Pax Romana

John Hartwick ()

No 1313, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: We set out a simple four sector macro model of the economy of the Roman Empire during a period of considerable economic prosperity. Our focus is on gold coins as currency and the seignorage which the government used to fund its activities. We solve numerically for a balanced growth representation of the economy of the empire, a solution that captures the intricacies of money creation, currency expansion and seignorage. We subscribe to the view that the exhaustion of low-cost gold and silver deposits contributed significantly to the ending of the economic prosperity enjoyed by Roman Italy and its provinces during the so-called Pax Romana (31 BC to 165 CE) and we attempt to capture significant shifts in variables during the decline.

Keywords: Roman money supply; gold coinage; money during Pax Romana (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E10 E40 N10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/qed_wp_1313.pdf First version 2013 (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:qed:wpaper:1313

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Babcock ().