Wage-stickiness, monetary changes, and real incomes in late-medieval England and the low countries 1300–1500: Did money matter?

Abstract

The primary explanation for the marked rise in real wages in both England and Flanders, from the later fourteenth to mid fifteenth centuries, was a combination of institutional wage stickiness and deflation. In both countries, nominal wages had indeed risen after the Black Death (1348), but so had the cost of living, with a rampant inflation that lasted until the late 1370s in England and the late 1380s in Flanders. Thereafter, consumer prices fell sharply but money wages did not - or, in Flanders, not as much as did consumer prices. The other thesis of this paper is that these later medieval price movements were fundamentally monetary in nature.

Citation

Munro, J.H. (2003), "Wage-stickiness, monetary changes, and real incomes in late-medieval England and the low countries 1300–1500: Did money matter?", Research in Economic History (Research in Economic History, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 185-297. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-3268(03)21007-7