The interwar years saw the rise of New York to challenge London as the world's leading provider of financial services.  This paper will show that the current explanations fail to identify a key factor in New York's rise.  The City was prevented from operating a full capacity by a capital...

Motivated by features of low latency data in finance we study in detail discrete-valued Levy processes as the basis of price processes for high frequency econometrics.  An important case of this is a Skellam process, which is the difference of two independent Poisson processes.  We propose a...

 This paper assesses the quantitative impact of ambiguity on the historically observed financial asset returns and prices. The single agent, in a dynamic exchange economy, treats the conditional uncertainty about the consumption and dividends next period as ambiguous. We calibrate the agent's...

Many groups have to make decisions over multiple interconnected pro-positions. The doctrinal paradox or discursive dilemma shows that propositionwide majority voting can lead to inconsistent collective outcomes even when individual judgments are all consistent. How likely is the occurrence of...

We consider whether oil prices can account for business cycle asymmetries. We test for asymmetries based on the Markov switching autoregressive model popularized by Hamilton (1989), using the tests devised by Clements and Krolzig (2000). We select the transformation of the oil price of Lee, Ni...

We examine the determinants of time allocation and child labour in a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria.  Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs on individuals.  Whether individuals could recruit substitutes depended on...

Formed in the mid-nineteenth century, the building soceities grew rapidly from their humble beginnings as localised 'self-help' organisations to become the dominant player in the house mortgage market by the inter-war period.  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the...

By analysing a newly compiled data base of grain prices, this article finds that prior to the nineteenth century the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented.  It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that market integration...

The early twelfth century was notable for the centralization and consolidation of royal governance in the centre as well as the periphery of Europe.  This paper presents a model of medieval kingship in which consent for the king's rule is founded upon a network of bargains and agreements...