During the hundred-year period from about 1320 to about 1420, the Florentine woollen cloth industry underwent two closely connected crises. The first crisis was the consequence, direct and indirect, of the ravages of warfare and falling population, afflicting the entire Mediterranean basin and...

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...

This study is a much revised and extended version of two previously issued working papers on the production, sale, and consumption of woollen textiles in England and the Low Countries, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It focuses on the hey-day of the production and international...

The Anti-Red Shift -- to the Dark Side: Changes in the Colour Patterns and Market Values of Flemish Luxury Woollens, 1300 - 1550 This study documents, though it cannot fully explain, the striking shift in the spectrum of colour patterns in woollen textiles, from those of the Black Death era in...

If mankind’s three basic necessities have always been food, clothing, and shelter, whose production, trade, and consumption have rightly been a primary focus of economists and economic historians for many generations, we may ask this vital question: how do they distinguish between necessities...

The European Union's strategy to raise employment is confronted with very low work participation among many minority ethnic groups, in particular among immigrants. This study examines the potential of immigrants' identification with the home and host country ethnicity to explain that deficit. It...

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socio-economic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic...

This paper uses the concept of ethnic self-identification of immigrants in a twodimensional framework. It acknowledges the fact that attachments to the home and the host country are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are three possible paths of adjustment from separation at entry, namely...

The paper provides a new measure of the ethnic identity of immigrants and explores its evolution in the host country. The ethnosizer, a measure of the intensity of a person's ethnic identity, is constructed from information on the following elements: language, culture, societal interaction,...

The paper investigates the role of human capital for migrants' ethnic ties towards their home and host countries. Pre-migration characteristics dominate ethnic self-identification. Human capital acquired in the host country does not affect the attachment to the receiving country.