Monetary Capacity
Nuno Palma,
Roberto Bonfatti,
Adam Brzezinski and
Kıvanç Karaman
No 15299, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
Monetary capacity refers to a state's capacity to circulate money that is accepted by the public, whereas fiscal capacity refers to its capacity to tax. In this paper, we show both theoretically and empirically that monetary and fiscal capacity, and by extension, markets and states have a symbiotic relationship. On the theoretical front, we propose a model that establishes that a higher monetary capacity incentivizes the government to invest in the capacity to tax, because monetization eases taxation. Higher fiscal capacity, in turn, increases the public demand for money, because expected inflation is lower. On the empirical front, we find that monetary capacity had a significant and substantial causal impact on fiscal capacity. To identify this impact, we rely on a natural experiment, instrumenting the money stocks of England, France and Spain between 1550 and 1790 by the silver and gold output in the New World. Finally, to put our findings into a long-run perspective, we collect money stock and tax revenue data for European states from antiquity to the modern period, and document the close relationship between the two. These findings indicate that economic and political development cannot be understood independently. They also qualify the theory of the long-run neutrality of money: exogenous changes in money stock can and did have real long-run effects.
Keywords: Monetary capacity; Fiscal capacity; Monetization; inflation; Taxation; Quantity theory of money; Monetary non-neutrality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E50 E60 H21 N10 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15299 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Working Paper: Monetary Capacity (2025) 
Working Paper: Monetary Capacity (2020) 
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:cpr:ceprdp:15299
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15299
orders@cepr.org
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (repec@cepr.org).