Farm settlement, where borrowing is constrained, is addressed with a life-cycle model. Because a pioneer farm must be cleared before becoming productive, the settler first accumulates in order to purchase supplies and maintain consumption during the initial years. Implications of the model are...

An inability to borrow affected migration from Europe to North America. This capital constraint is formalized with a life-cycle model, where agents jointly choose how much to save, the optimal period to finance migration, and whether to migrate. Using a life-cycle model we show that preference...

Pricing behavior at three Hudson's Bay Company trading posts is examined in terms of a model of long-run profit maximization of a depletable resource. At Fort Churchill, where the company acted as a monopsonist purchaser of furs from the Indians, rising European fur prices had little impact on...