Charles Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission...

Can industrial policy be effective when dealing with a revolutionary new technology? Mark Casson's recent book, "The World's First Railway System," offers the intriguing claim that a slight dose of central planning by the British government in the 1840s would have produced a dramatically more...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Walter Bagehot is remembered today primarily as a proponent of the doctrine of lender of last resort, in which central banks pump money into the economy to ameliorate the damage from a financial crisis. But none of the growing number of publications about him appear to investigate in depth...

In this paper we investigate the effects of new railway stations on house prices using an extensive repeated sales dataset over a period of 13 years. We employ semiparametric panel data techniques allowing for anticipation effects of station openings. We show that a kilometre reduction in...

We estimate the network externality of a public transit system by examining the effects of its expansion on the housing market. Our results show that a major expansion of Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system increased the price of apartments within 0.5 km of a pre-expansion station by...

In this paper we investigate the effects of new railway stations on house prices using an extensive repeated sales dataset over a period of 13 years. We employ semiparametric panel data techniques allowing for anticipation effects of station openings. We show that a kilometre reduction in...

We estimate the network effects of a public transit system by examining the impact of its expansion on housing prices. Our results show that a major expansion of Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system increased the price of apartments within 0.5 km of a pre-expansion station by 1.8%...