Scottish attempts at financial innovation in the late seventeenth century included the Bank of Scotland and the Darien Scheme. The Bank is still in existence, but the Darien scheme’s mission to site a Scottish colony on the isthmus of Darien, Panama, was a disaster. It has often been...

This article studies the effects of demographics on the mix of tax rates on labour and capital. It uses a quantitative general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model where tax rates are voted without past commitments in every period and characterized as a Markov equilibrium. In the U.S., the...

The Royal African Company used fortified locations along the African coast as part of its slave trading activities. These forts have occupied a peripheral role in the business history of the company and the economic history of its trading routes. Traditionally, the forts have been seen as a...

Using generating functions, the top-order zonal polynomials that occur in much distribution theory under normality can be recursively related to other symmetric functions (power-sum and elementary symmetric functions, Ruben (1962), Hillier, Kan, and Wang (2009)). Typically, in a recursion of...

In this paper we document some features of the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in Canada using survey data from many different sources. We find that wage and income inequality have increased substantially over the last 30 years, but that much of this rise was offset by the tax and...

We document that home ownership of households with “heads\" aged 25-44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities made it...

This paper presents a macroeconomic model of unsecured consumer debt and default where credit conditions consist of pre-approved interest rates and borrowing limits, a feature of actual credit cards. All loans, irrespective of their size and risk, take place against the same type of credit line,...

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 has commonly been thought of as a disaster for the stock market and Georgian society. Recent revisionist work has queried whether the economic dislocation was indeed severe. The South Sea Company itself continued to trade in slaves with the Royal Navy’s assistance....

We study a simple dynamic model of social learning with local informational exter-nalities. There is a large population of agents, who repeatedly have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each of which is optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses...

This paper considers a multi-unit ascending auction with two players and common values. A large set of equilibria in this model is not robust to a small reputational perturbation. In particular, if there is a positive probability that there is a type who always demands many units, regardless of...