In England, across the whole period of the Great Debasement, the mint issued six different kinds of silver coins and three kinds of gold coins. According to Gresham’s Law, coins with the same face value but different intrinsic values can not circulate side by side for too long: only those...

The Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) aims to increasecompetition and to foster client protection in the European financialmarket. Among other provisions, it abolishes the concentration rule andchallenges the market ower of existing trading venues. The directiveintroduces venue...

[...]Our first suggestion is to reduce the fragmentation oftrading in STRIPS by assigning the same CUSIP number to allSTRIPS maturing on a common date—thus making thoseSTRIPS fungible with each other. In addition to enhancing theliquidity of the STRIPS market, this action would ensure...

In the field of housing economics, there is a long traditionof evaluating housing outcomes for the entire populationand various subgroups by tracking four key variables, orconcepts: the physical adequacy of the occupied housingunit, the number of people living in the unit relative to thenumber...

[...]In this paper, we update this affordability debateusing data from the 1990s. We follow Gyourko and Linneman(1993) in addressing the affordability issue by asking asimple question: Is a home of a given quality from ten ortwenty years ago more or less affordable today to a householdsimilarly...

[...]What might account for this link between parentalincome and children’s income? Many economists believethat this relationship is due in large part to differentialhuman-capital investment between high-income andlow-income families. High-income parents can invest inmore (and better)...

[...]The New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS)project represents one effort to track the consequences ofpolicy reform and devolution for inequality and well-beingin the largest and most diverse city in the United States.The project uses a telephone survey to collect data from arepeated...

The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...

[...]The purpose of this article is to develop a clearerpicture of the importance of payments services to the bankingindustry. This goal is served by taking a broad view of thepayments business and analyzing information provided bylarge bank holding companies (BHCs) in their annualreports. BHCs...