Grupos de Investigación |
“The making of a national currency. Spatial transaction costs and money market integration in Spain (1825-1874)"Jueves 11 de Agosto. Hora 15:00. (Día extraordinario)
Ponente:
ABSTRACT Within Western Europe, Spain has often been presented as a case of late market integration. According to this view, the prevailing institutional and geographical constraints that prevented the complete integration of the Spanish markets were not removed until the late 19th century, thanks to a large extent to the construction of the national railway network. This paper approaches the integration of the Spanish economy through the evolution of the money market, which constituted an example of a pure market that operated without public interference. Before the implementation of a national settlement system in the early 1880s, money was traded between the Spanish cities as a response to spatial price differences in the market of bills of exchange. On the basis of the estimation of a threshold autoregressive (TAR) model of the quotations in Madrid of bills of exchange on a sample of the most liquid Spanish cities, we find that, between the 1820s and the 1870s, price gaps were significantly reduced. This reduction started before the arrival of the telegraph and railway technologies, probably thanks to the improvement in the main road network and the reorganization of the Spanish postal service. On the other hand, despite the significant decrease in transaction costs, no progress took place in the efficiency in the market, which remained rather low until the 1870s. |