The “money question” — which is to say, the question concerning the proper meaning of a “standard” U.S. dollar — was hotly contested throughout most of U.S. history, and partly for this reason a gold standard that was both official and functioning was in effect only for a period...

Using intraday data, we study spillovers from European stock markets to the U.S. in the hours before the flash crash on 6 May 2010. Many commentators have pointed to negative market sentiment and high volatility during the European trading session before the Flash Crash. However, based on a...

Central bank lender of last resort (LOLR) regimes are the last line of defence before governments are forced to resort to taxpayer-funded bailouts of the financial system. Yet despite this important role, along with a rich theoretical literature examining the function and design of LOLR regimes,...

Using new monthly series collected together for the first time for Finland, this paper analyses the performance and development of the Finnish equity and money markets as well as the equity premium and inflation from 1912 to 2009. The series are analyzed and compared to similar series from...

This paper investigates the origins of the shareholder-orientated corporate governance (CG) model of the US and the stakeholder-orientated model prevailing in continental Europe (exemplified by Switzerland and Germany) for most of the 20th century. We reject the most common theories, which...

The massification of retail finance in the 1980s relied on the successful deployment of automated teller machines (ATM) and on-line real-time (OLRT) computing during the 1960s and 1970s. We document how the deployment of ATM networks interweaved with the adoption of OLRT computing in Sweden and...

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjective well-being. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a baseline happiness that shows persistent strength over time, and twin studies have shown that genes play a significant role in explaining...

This paper discusses (a) the role of cognitive and noncognitive ability in shaping adult outcomes, (b) the early emergence of differentials in abilities between children of advantaged families and children of disadvantaged families, (c) the role of families in creating these abilities, (d)...

How can economic theory explain the reasons why consumers adopt innovations? Using the example of innovations in washing machines two approaches are compared. The first focuses in the manner of household production theory on changes in constraints without specifying preferences, leading to the...

The equilibrium conditions for an economic system that produces output with several factors of production and which is subject to technological constraints are derived. Optimization of either output minus cost or integrated utility yields the conditions that output elasticities must be equal to...