European Review of Economic History: page  of  C  European Historical Economics Society  doi:./S A new method for estimating the money demand in pre-industrial economies: probate inventories and Spain in the eighteenth century ESTEBAN A. NICOLINI ∗ AND FERNANDO RAMOS ∗∗ ∗ Department of Economics and Figuerola Institute, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, esteban.nicolini@ucm.es ∗∗ Economic History Department, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, fcrampal@upo.es or fernando.ramos.palencia@gmail.com The study of monetary phenomena and an understanding of price determination in modern Europe are too often limited by scarcity of good-quality data sets on the evolution across time of such variables as money holdings, income, or wealth. In this article we show that information contained in probate inventories can be extremely useful in circumventing this problem. In particular, we combine a data set of  inventories from Palencia (in northern Spain) between  and  with census information (Catastro de Ensenada) in order to create a cross-section estimate of money demand, a first for any period before the nineteenth century. Results provide meaningful insights about relationships among money demand, wealth, urbanization and structural change in a pre-industrial economy; they also highlight the potential of probate inventories for improving our general understanding of the monetary history of modern Europe. . Introduction Information on the characteristics of the demand for money is crucial to understanding the evolution of price levels. However, good-quality time series of the variables needed to estimate money demand (such as interest rates, income, wealth) are scarce for any economy prior to the nineteenth century. For this reason, the vast majority of economic historians tried to explain the evolution of prices in pre-industrial Europe by using the Fisher identity (MV = PT ) and suggesting hypotheses about what part of the changes in price levels (P ) can be assigned to changes in the stock of money (M ), the amount of transactions (T ), or the velocity of circulation (V ).