[...]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)...

This paper describes a new and intuitive methodfor answering these technical questions by tabulating theexact loss distribution arising from correlated credit eventsfor any arbitrary portfolio of counterparty exposures, downto the individual contract level, with the losses measuredon a...

[...]This study is the first formal investigation ofconsumer attitudes that compares the forecasting power ofthe University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentimentand the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index.We begin with a background analysis of structural differencesbetween the...

The British industrial revolution created an industrial economy. While casual discourse conflates industrialization and economic growth, Britain was remarkable primarily for the pronounced structural change that occurred rather than for rapid economic growth. Uniquely the British labour force...

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories...

Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the...

Since the 1980s the debate about economic convergence hasdominated empirical work about the dynamics of growth. Economichistorians have been attracted, in particular, by stories of clubconvergence. However, the analytical foundations of most of the work inthis area have rested on linear, or more...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positiverelationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain eventhough many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixingagreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 RestrictivePractices Act and...