This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....

The Phillips curve is fifty years old. Since Phillips (1958)'s original contribution this econometric relationship has undergone many criticisms and evolutions. The Phillips curve yet remains a fundamental tool for inflation forecasting and monetary policy analysis. This paper reviews the...

We use data on enterprise level from a survey of medium sized and big companies to test for downward nominal wage rigidity in Poland. We find relatively weak support for downward nominal wage rigidity when average total compensation in the enterprise is taken into account. However, since this...

The September 30, 1978 legislation (P.L. 95-405), which renewed the authority of the CFTC to regulate futures markets, directs the Commission to solicit the advice of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve before authorizing any additional futures contracts that specify delivery of U.S. Government...

In a recent article, Ederington (1979) examined the hedging performance of financial futures markets using a portfolio model derived from the hedging theories of Stein (1961) and Johnson (1960). His article concluded that GNMA futures were more effective than T-Bill futures in reducing price...

The September 30, 1978 legislation (P.L. 95-405), which renewed the authority of the CFTC to regulate futures markets, directs the Commission to solicit the advice of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve before authorizing any additional futures contracts that specify delivery of U.S. Government...

In a recent article, Puglisi developed and tested a model for evaluating the efficiency of the Treasury bill futures market. He found that the market for Treasury bill futures was not efficient because arbitrage opportunities existed involving transactions in futures and outstanding Treasury...

Until the existence of financial futures, testing the determinants and the informational content of futures market prices has been difficult because of the vagaries associated with commodity markets. In the case of Treasury bill futures, the existence of an active secondary market and the...