During the two decades after the Second World War, international tradeexpanded at its most rapid pace of the twentieth century. Between 1948 and1968, the total volume of merchandise exports from non-communist countriesgrew by a remarkable 290 percent. 2 And the growth of world trade during...

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework forincentive-compatible regulation that would enable regulatorsto ensure that riskier banks maintain higher capitalholdings.Under the precommitment approach, a bankannounces the appropriate level of capital that covers themaximum value of...

[...]This paper presents an overview of the new capitalrequirements. In the first section, we describe the structureof the requirements and the considerations that went intotheir design. In addition, we address some of the concernsthat have been raised about the methods of calculating...

[...]We conclude that technological change, combinedwith overall growth in the capital stock, is the most importantfactor driving the growing wage inequality betweenlow-skilled and high-skilled workers. Increased competitionfrom abroad, both from developing and industrializedcountries, appears...

This paper tests whether the so-called ‘reach of the market’ helps to explain ‘why Europe’ and ‘why north-western Europe’. By looking at grain markets from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, this study concludes that the process of commodity market integration...

This paper identifies the absence of both sub-continentally oriented histories which knit together the land and sea trades, and convincing explanations of the persistence of the Indo-Central Asian trade (for example) despite the growing Indo-European trade from the seventeenth-century. The...

Statistical analysis of Greek sovereign debt denominated in gold and traded on the London Stock Exchange from the outbreak of the First World War until the advent of the Great Depression is employed to explore the way that historical events including political and institutional changes shaped...

Much of the literature on economic change in the post-1945 world is permeated by two ideas: the temporal convergence of per capita incomes across economies and the spatial advance of free trade. For many economists and historians the two are linked: the reduction of trade barriers in the...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...

This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire’s slowadoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additionaltransport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machinereduced ring adoption rates, these supply side constraints...