The Late Middle Ages (c.1300–c.1500) saw the development of many of the key economic institutions of the modern unitary nation-state in Europe. After the ‘commercial revolution’ of the thirteenth century, taxes on trade became increasingly significant contributors to government finances,...

Edwards and Ogilvie (2008) dispute the empirical basis for the view (Greif, e.g., 1989, 1994, 2006) that multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They assert that the relations among merchants and agents were law-based. This paper...

This paper investigates the implications for international markets of the existence of retailers/wholesalers with market power. Two main results are shown. First, in the presence of buyer power trade liberalization may lead to retail market concentration. Due to this concentration retail prices...

This paper investigates the impact of the distribution sector on the real exchange rate, controlling for the Balassa-Samuelson effect, as well as other macro variables. Long-run coefficients are estimated using a panel dynamic OLS estimator. The main result is that an increase in the...

This paper develops a model in which market structure is determined endogenously by the choice of intermediation mode. We consider two representative business modes of intermediation that are widely used in real-life markets: one is a middleman mode by which an intermediary holds inventories...