This paper reviews the origins of the 2 per percent rule, arguing that existing evidence for the rule is not as strong as is often supposed and that in any case it can be a misleading guide to the payoff period in policy applications. In the context of a postulated change in the rate of increase...

This paper provides a framework with which to analyse growth in a small economy with perfect capital mobility. It provides a diagrammatic representation of steady states which differs in interesting and important ways from the usual closed-economy Solow-Swan diagram. The paper also analyses...

A long-term assessment of Asia's share of global GDP suggests that Asia has now almost reclaimed the role in the global economy it occupied in 1820. By focusing on the experience of key economies in Asia, this paper assesses why the continent's role weakened between 1820 and 1950 and...

This paper relies on daily price indices for stocks and bonds to analyze the functioning of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in the period 1931-1940. Although the TSE was a large and liquid market, its pricing mechanisms significantly deviated from weak-form efficiency. In this context, zaibatsu...

This paper considers the evidence on real commodity prices over 160 years for 30 commodities representing 7.89 trillion USD worth of production in 2011. In so doing, it suggests and documents a complete typology of real commodity prices, comprising long-run trends, medium-run cycles, and...

Railroads in Meiji Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but the impact on firms is unclear. Using a newly developed firm-level dataset and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of...