Since 2002, the British Government department responsible for immigration, the Home Office, has claimed immigrants pay £2-5bn more in tax than they withdraw from the public purse. The workings behind this figure omit the cost of the additional infrastructure investments that immigrants...

Publicly created money, i.e. base money, costs much less to produce than privately created money because amongst other things private banks have to check up on the credit worthiness of borrowers before supplying them with money. In contrast governments do not need to do those checks when...

The recent banking crisis laid bare a long standing and inherent defect in fractional reserve banking: the fact that fractional reserve is unlikely to work for long without taxpayer backing. Changing bank regulations in such a way that banks are never a burden on taxpayers leads inexorably to...

Section 1 of this work argues the case for full reserve banking. Section 2 explains the flaws in a large number of arguments put AGAINST full reserve, and section 3 explains the flaws in a few arguments put IN FAVOUR of full reserve.

Sir John Vickers (Chairman of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking (2011)), published a discussion paper entitled “Some Economics of Banking Reform” (Vickers (2012)). This is my contribution to the “discussion”, that is, I make some criticisms of the paper. The Independent...

Fractional reserve banking is inherently risky, which in large part explains the hundreds of bank failures throughout history and the 2007/8 bank crisis which lead to catastrophic economic and social damage. So fractional reserve must have some amazing benefits to make up for the latter...

If government so much as hints that it will rescue banks in trouble, that constitutes a subsidy of banks, and subsidies misallocate resources. Alternatively, if government makes it clear it will never rescue banks, then all of those who fund banks, regardless of whether they are called...

This study applies the nonparametric estimation procedure to the diffusion process modeling the dynamics of short-term interest rates. This approach allows us to operate in continuous time, estimating the continuous-time model, despite the use of discrete data. Three methods are proposed. We...

The issue of over-utilization of medical procedures has generated strong debate in the United States. It is well acknowledged that, in the agency relationship between physicians and patients, the informational advantage gives doctors an incentive to deviate from the appropriate treatment as...