This article revisits the key issue raised by researchers who have empirically investigated the behaviour of short term US interest rates during the period 1890-1933. The seminal article of Mankiw, Miron and Weil (1987) argues that changes in the behaviour of nominal interest rates is best...

This article draws on a variety of time series tools to more deeply explore issues surrounding the emergence of a national capital market in the late 19th century. Our focus is on the timing of the emergence of a national capital market. Rather than relying on the absolute narrowing of regional...

Previous literature on the stability of the US money demand function suggests mixed results. In this article, we study the stability of the money demand function from the standpoint of structural changes in the function. We first investigate if a stable money demand function can be found for the...

Conventional wisdom holds that stocks are riskier than bonds; thus when the stock market becomes volatile, money flows from the stock market into the perceived safe haven of the bond market. In this article, we find that this notion is not necessarily accurate and might lead people to make...

We estimate a time series model of voter turnout for 34 US presidential elections, 1880--2012. Employing a variety of econometric techniques, our major results are as follows. (1) A negative and significant structural shift in voter turnout occurs in 1972 and is too large to be explained by the...

This study investigates, using annual data from 1974--2004, whether unionization rates, trade openness and central bank independence can help explain cross-national and inter-temporal variations in level of peak inflation prior to a disinflationary policy adjustment. I find that unionization is...

Inflation stationarity has important theoretical and policy implications, yet most of the literature has focused on low inflation countries. This article investigates inflation stationarity in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Bolivia during a hyperinflationary period from 1980 to 2004. We...

Michael Lewis’ influential book <italic>Moneyball</italic> (2003) discusses several sources of inefficiency in the Major League Baseball (MLB) labour market; one of these being the failure of baseball scouts to place a draft premium on college players. We test this implication of the <italic>Moneyball</italic> thesis -- the...