Many finance questions require a full characterization of the distribution of returns. We propose a bivariate model of returns and realized volatility (RV), and explore which features of that time-series model contribute to superior density forecasts over horizons of 1 to 60 days out of sample....

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

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...

The late Prof. Hans Van Werveke, in two very contentious articles, had contended that the monetary policies of Count Lodewijk van Male (Louis de Male) 'had checked, for some time at least, the decay of the Flemish cloth industry' by allowing its industrial entrepreneurs (weaver-drapers) to pay...

This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the...

This paper re-examines the classic demographic or 'real' model, essentially based on a Malthusian-Ricardian model, that the late Michael Postan (Cambridge) utilized to explain the behaviour of the later-medieval western European economy, and in particular the behaviour of price movements. In...

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...

Dispersion of money balances among individuals is the basis for a range of policies but it has been abstracted from in monetary theory for tractability reasons. In this paper, we fill in this gap by constructing a tractable search model of money with a non-degenerate distribution of money...

We construct and analyze a tractable search model of money with a non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Analytical tractability comes from modeling decentralized exchange as directed search, which makes the monetary steady state block recursive. By adapting lattice-theoretic techniques,...

In 1795, the French Revolutionary government, in establishing our modern metric system, also established the metric values for the historic European mint weights of the ancien re,gime era. If those mint-weights are undoubtedly valid for the 18th century, can we be certain that all had remained...