The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

TResearch by J.D. Sachs and A.M. Warner, indicates that resource-rich countries are less successful in terms of economic growth than are resource-poor countries. The question of what measures Icelanders need to take to prevent their fishery wealth from limiting economic growth is posed. The main...

This paper examines why some transitions are more successful than others by focusing attention on the role of productive, protective and predatory behaviors from the perspective of the new institutional economics. Many transition economies are characterized by a fundamental inconsistency between...

Unproductive enterprises that feed on productive businesses, are rampant in developing countries. A consequence of parasitic enterprises is that societies may be locked into a self enforcing configuration of beliefs and practices that result in persistent poverty. When entrepreneurs of both...

The windfall acquisition of precious metals from American mines and the military revolution of the Early Modern age allowed the Spanish monarchs to command large amounts of credit andpursue an expansive imperial policy unlike that of any other Early Modern nation; when the costof the Empire...

This paper studies the effect of clustering of liquidity trades on intraday patterns of volatility and market depth when private information is long-lived. The assumption of long-lived information allows us to distinguish between the patterns of information arrival and information use. Our...

The link between informed trading and the bid-ask spread has been the focus of abundant literature and some authors feared that a large amount of informed trading might lead to shutdown of markets. We explore this issue using data from the Czech Republic. Our estimates confirm that the share of...

The paper presents results of empirical tests with hybrid nominal exchange rate models for the Brazilian foreign exchange market, using macroeconomic and market microstructure variables. The basic model was originally proposed and tested in the German (DM/US$) and the Japanese (¥/US$) foreign...

Recently, the continuous double auction, i.e. the trading mechanism used in the majority of the financial markets, is the subject of an extensive study. In the present paper, a model of the continuous double auction with the completely random flow of the limit orders is studied. The main result...