This article provides a revised account of the development of financial instruments, money and banking in the early penal colony of New South Wales. It is found that private instruments monetised the economy, while the role of state debt, coin and commodities was to finally settle remaining...

This paper reexamines the view that banking regulation and central banking arose to counter market 'failures.' It investigates the factors that led bankers to form clubs and examines the 'regulations' imposed by clubs on their members. It suggests that such regulation is different from...

This paper uses survivor fan charts to illustrate the prospective density functions of future male survival rates. The fan charts are based on a version of the Cairns-Blake-Dowd model of male mortality that provides a good fit to recent mortality data for England and Wales. They indicate that...

Existing models of currency competition and monetary union ignore network effects and switching costs. This paper develops a simple model that incorporates these features and shows how it can be used to shed light on observed monetary experience and current issues in international monetary...

Spectral risk measures are attractive risk measures as they allow the user to obtain risk measures that reflect their subjective risk aversion. This paper examines spectral risk measures based on an exponential utility function, and finds that these risk measures have nice intuitive properties....