This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

The basic thesis is that the modern 'financial revolution', usually dated to eighteenth century England, but far more properly to the sixteenth-century Netherlands, in terms of those institutions for both government finance (borrowing) and international finance (bills of exchange), owed its...

There are substantial cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+). A theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply...

We develop a theory of capital-market imperfections to study how the ability to enforce contracts affects resource allocation across entrepreneurs of different productivities, and across industries with different needs for external financing. The theory implies that countries with a poor ability...

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 Earl Hamilton's famous 1929 thesis on 'Profit Inflation' and the 'birth of modern industrial capitalism': namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs with...

We build a heterogeneous life-cycle model which captures a large number of salient features of individual labor supply, by education, over the life cycle. The model provides an aggregation theory of individual labor supply, firmly grounded on micro evidence, and is used to study the aggregate...

We build a heterogeneous life-cycle model which captures a large number of salient features of individual labor supply over the life cycle, by education, both along the intensive and extensive margins. The model provides an aggregation theory of individual labor supply, firmly grounded on...

China has achieved impressive growth over the last three decades. However, there has been debate over the sources of the growth, and the role of the intensive versus extensive margin. Growth accounting exercises at the aggregate level (Rawski and Perkins, 2008; Bosworth and Collins, 2008) suggest an...

This is a substantially revised version of an earlier Working Paper (posted in 2002, with a different title), based on much new data and other information. It re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely,...