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...

This paper seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the nouvelles draperies chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the...

This paper, a much revised version of an earlier paper (with different tables), seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the nouvelles draperies chose to use them, and why their resort...

We introduce a model of an local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite population. Under an especially mild condition of boundedness of per capita payoffs we show nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate that the equal treatment core...

We examine the extent to which vertical and horizontal market structure can together explain incomplete pass-through. We develop a model that highlights the interactions between horizontal and vertical structure and their effects on pass-through from commodity to wholesale prices and wholesale...

We consider a new model of a local public goods economy with differentiated crowding in which we make a distinction between the tastes and crowding characteristics of agents. It is possible in this model to have taste-homogeneous jurisdictions that take advantage of the full array of positive...

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....

This paper explores two models of an economy in which contracts are exchanged. In the first version contracts are exchanged on a competitive market in which traders expectations concerning conditions that prevail within specific markets adjust until markets `clear'. In the second model contract...

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...