Tax Freedom Day memorises the day in a calendar year that individual households no longer transfer their income to their government, but start earning an income for the household. In the same manner one could also define a “Debt Freedom Day” as the day that individual households no longer...

An Income Gap Theory and it effects on Unemployment and Economic Growth By Drs Kees De Koning Abstract An income gap is often described as the difference in incomes between the rich and poor. This is a relative gap. In economies a different income gap can occur which can be defined as the...

The U.K.’s recent economic developments can be broken down in two distinct periods. The period 2002-2008 was the period in which economic growth was satisfactory and individual households’ wages and salaries were increasing at a level higher than inflation rates. It was also the period that...

The real financial crisis in the U.S. and in other countries did not take place in the banking or the wider financial sector -yes banks and others financial institutions were affected by their own induced excessive lending schemes- but no, it seriously affected the individual households. More...

In 1946 the economist Arthur Burns defined a business cycle as a period of expansion occurring about the same time in many economic activities, followed by similar general recessions, contractions and revivals, which merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle. Cycles may take from one year...

An important purpose of derivatives modelling is to provide practitioners with actionable measures of risk. The Black and Scholes volatility remains a favourite on trading floors in spite of well-known biases. One popular extension is to make volatility a function of time and the underlying...

In derivatives modelling, it has often been necessary to make assumptions about the volatility of the underlying variable over the life of the contract. This can involve specifying an exact trajectory, as in the Black and Scholes (1973), Merton (1973) or Black (1976) models; one that depends on...

Executive Summary included in the Paper

Historical ‘bubbles’ are often attributed to mispricing, but the empirical analysis of such episodes has been limited. This paper examines a notable but academically neglected period, known as the British Railway Mania, using a new dataset and a cross-sectional methodology which is unique to...

During the British Railway Mania of the 1840s the promotion and construction of new railways increased dramatically. These new projects were generally financed by shares with uncalled capital, which allowed investors to make payments on an instalment basis over a period of several years. There...