Although this paper is, ostensibly, a macro- and micro-economic historical study of competition in the West European woollen textile ind ustries, in France, the Low Countries, England, Italy, and Iberia (Catalonia and Aragon), and of their related wool and cloth trades, covering all of Europe...

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...

We study the consequences of the introduction of widespread limited liability for corporations, with particular reference to the liability reforms introduced in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. In the view that is most widely accepted, by reducing transactions costs associated with...

In this paper we study a large market in which sellers compete by offering auctions to buyers instead of simple fixed price contracts. Two variants of the model are studied. One extends a model first analyzed by Wolinsky (1988) in which buyers learn their valuations only after meeting sellers....

What is the impact on human capital investment when a worker's ability and investments are observed by the labour market only when the worker invests in self-promoting activities? When firms pay spot market wages, high ability workers overinvest in self- promotion. There is no employment...

In this paper, we introduce private information into a market with search frictions and evaluate the relative efficiency of two pricing mechanisms, price posting and bargaining. Each seller chooses investment that determines the quality of the good. This quality is the seller's private...

We study a screening game in a competitive insurance market, in which insurance customers differ with respect to both accident probability and degree of risk aversion. It is shown that indifference curves of customers in different risk classes cross exactly twice: thus the single crossing...

This paper examines the mutual fund market as a market for the sale of management services using an unbalanced panel of 860 US equity funds over the 1976-1993 period. From among the performance measures for which investors have the necessary information to compute, we find that the Jensen...

This paper develops a model which explains the determinants of the management expenses charged by U.S. equity funds. The study shows that for high quality managers, an increase in quality is associated with higher fees. In contrast, as the quality of the lower quality managers deteriorates,...