This paper uses new data to extend the argument that there was an integrated wheat market in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. I explore the meaning of randomness when data are scarce, and I investigate how we recreate the nature of ancient societies by asking new questions that...

Rome was an exceedingly large city at the start of the Roman Empire, and it required massive grain imports to feed its population. We argue that Roman merchants organized these imports and that they used a variety of mechanisms to deal with the informational problems of long-distance trade at...

In this paper I use a theoretical hierarchy of financial sources to evaluate the effectiveness of financial markets in the early Roman Empire. I first review the theory of financial intermediation to describe the hierarchy of financial sources and survey briefly the history of financial...