This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the 'draperies' or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic League as the...

This paper is a necessary companion to the one entitled The West European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c.1000 - 1500. No one can properly comprehend that five-century history of international competition for textile markets, without some basic understanding...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major 'institutional' international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the �draperies� or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German...

This paper examines the effects on real exchange rates of exogenous money supply shocks. Such shocks are conventionally associated with monetary policy, although they may also arise from shifts in the desired reserve to deposit ratio of the banking system or in the public's desired currency to...

Increasingly, a small number of low-wage countries such as China and India are involved in innovation -- not 'big ideas' innovation, but the constant incremental innovations needed to stay ahead in business. We provide some evidence of this new phenomenon and develop a model in which there is a...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...

A theory is developed to explain a number of stylized facts well known to international economists: first, countries' real and nominal exchange rates tend to move together under flexible exchange rate systems with the ratios of domestic to rest-of-world price levels showing much less...

This paper finds an important relationship between the international food trade and cross-country income and productivity differences. Poor countries have low labour productivity in agriculture relative to other sectors, yet predominantly consume domestically-produced food. To understand these...

Over many millennia, mankind has laboured to consume and satisfy three very necessary material wants or needs: food (including drink), shelter, and clothing. Each of these, however, has also been a major object of luxury consumption in most European societies. Textiles were necessities in...