While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up...

This paper employs a unique dataset from the UK based on ten years of surveys of company directors and analysts conducted for Management Today to examine the relationship between a firm’s reputation and the returns on its shares. We find that investors who purchase stocks with reputation...

Securitized real estate prices have historically shown tendencies to rise substantially and then fall quickly, which is the case with the prices of many other traded assets. These episodes of price rallies and crashes may constitute the presence of positive or negative speculative bubbles in the...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’s essay we discuss a range of activities focusing on data-intensive antitrust cases in the hospital and consumer products industries. We also discuss our...

The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous...