El sistema financiero a finales de la Edad Media: instrumentos y métodos. AAVV

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El sistema financiero a finales de la Edad Media: instrumentos y métodos - AAVV


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money, from savers looking for investment opportunities, to towns looking for foreign funding. They did this on a local, regional, and interregional level. This finding begs the question to what degree late-medieval financial markets contributed to a more or less efficient reallocation of savings. Although difficult to answer, the question of efficiency is crucial for understanding markets, since these are supposed to bring together supply in demand in such a way that prices converge, and «pockets» where prices are either relatively high or low disappear. To get an impression of «efficiency» we will use a dataset based on a large government survey taken in Holland in 1514, inquiring amongst other things into the public debt towns and villages had created.

      Table 1 gives an overview of the annuities towns and villages had to pay out every year. The main towns of Holland were most heavily indebted: the burden of annuities per capita was 2,26 guilders. In other words: here every inhabitant contributed 2,26 guilders –presumably via taxation– to interest payments. In Holland’s many smaller towns the per capita contribution was much lower, at 0,79 guilders. This difference is most likely the result of the main towns increasingly being used by the rulers to gain access to financial markets: the towns thus sold annuities on behalf of the rulers because the latter lacked creditworthiness. The rulers did not use smaller towns to such ends, let alone villages: the latter’s public debt was on average 0,21 guilders per capita.

      The Informacie provides detailed information of the interest rates towns and villages paid on annuities –i. e. of the prices they paid in financial markets–. We have decided to focus on redeemable annuities, and to disregard life annuities: pricing of life annuities is likely to have been based in part on the age of the beneficiary and hence the number of years he could be expected to live. Since data on ages is not given in the Informacie, interest rates on life annuities cannot be used as an indicator for pricing. However, our source does give 282 interest rates public bodies paid on redeemable annuities. Most redeemable annuities (219 out of 279) carried an interest rate between 5,6 % and 7,1 %. A rate of 6,25 % was most common (80 of 279 observations).

      FIGURE 2

       Premiums on redeemable annuities (1514; N=279)

      Main towns: Dordecht, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden, Gouda, Amsterdam. Small towns: Beverwijk, Alkmaar, Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Medemblik, Edam, Monnikendam, Naarden, Weesp and Weesperkerspel, Muiden, Purmerend, Woerden, Oudewater, The Hague, Vlaardingen Gravenzande, Schoonhoven, Gorinchem, Heusden, Rotterdam, Schiedam, Geertruidenberg, Asperen, Heukelum.

      Towns rarely paid interest rates below 5,6 %. The outliers in our dataset –annuities carrying premiums either below 5,6 % or above 7,1 %–, had generally been sold by villages (46 of 60). This difference may well be due to towns selling annuities in large financial centers, where they competed with others in attracting investors, and where investors likewise competed amongst each other, the result being price convergence. Apparently villages generally operated on a smaller scale: they did not explore several financial markets, but would usually have tried to sell an annuity to a fellow villager, or to an inhabitant of the nearest village or town. They operated in a limited number of localities, which could also be fairly isolated: this sometimes yielded them favourable premiums, but could also force them to accept high interest rates.

      To be sure: not all villages found buyers for their annuities: several complained they lacked credit during the interrogation in 1514. Thus, when Hilversum, to the Southeast of


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