The “less-developed” interior of early modern Europe, especially the rural economy, is often regarded as financially comatose. This paper investigates this view using a rich dataset of marriage and death inventories for seventeenth-century Germany. It first analyzes how borrowing varied with...

An increasing number of households in Northern Ireland has started to collect oil stamps in recent years - i.e. small pieces of paper which can be purchased at specified outlets, collected on an oil stamps savings card, and used to pay in full or part for one's oil bill. In this paper, we...

In the matter of financial literacy it is often supposed that more is automatically preferable to less. This paper considers to what extent this may be true generally, and specifically focuses on the case of investment forecasting skill (a significant component of an individual's financial...

It is a well established fact that electricity use increases with income. What is less well known is that - despite the positive correlation between electricity use and income - a significant portion of low-income households consume very large amounts of electricity. In this paper, we make a...

In this paper, we revisit the problem of self-disconnection among prepayment energy customers. Using metering data from 2.3 million electricity pre-payment customers, we study how often households with an electricity pre-payment meter tend to self-disconnect over the course of a year - and why...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

This paper is concerned with testing the time series implications of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) due to Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965), when the number of securities, <em>N</em>, is large relative to the time dimension, <em>T</em>, of the return series. Two new tests of CAPM are proposed that exploit...

The concept of rational performance-chasing equilibrium in recent literature is supported neither by theory nor by empirical evidence. A more accurate model of such market dynamics is based on investor confusion, which is partly driven by some active managers' performance manipulation. Unlike...

The aim of this paper is to test the performance of the standard version of CAPM in an evolutionary framework. We imagine a heterogeneous population of long-lived agents who invest their wealth according to differential porfolio rules and ask what is the fate of those who happen to behave as...

We model endogenous correlation in asset returns via the role of heterogeneous expectations in investor types, and the dynamic impact of imitative learning by investors. Learning is driven by relative performance. In addition, we allow a cautious slow learning pace to reflect institutional...