One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

We reexamine the optimal fiscal and monetary policy in combined shopping-time monetary models with capital accumulation. Four models are constructed to examine how the production cost of money and the utility from physical capital affect the toolbox of the fiscal and monetary policy. It is shown...

Despite the current enthusiasms in applying the concept of microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool in many countries, the risk management aspects of microfinancing should not be overlooked. This paper highlights several incidences of default risks in microfinance and subsequently, provides a...

This paper investigates potential changes in monetary policy over the last decades using a nonparametric vector autoregression model. In the proposed model, the conditional mean and variance are time-dependent and estimated using a nonparametric local linear method, which allows for different...

The theory underpinning financial liberalization postulates that unregulated financial markets are growth-augmenting. Guyana has been a model reformer since 1988, implementing market-friendly policies. Growth performance, however, has been subdued. This paper argues that natural entry barriers...

The development of the capital markets increases the key role of the financial manager both in using the new techniques for administrating the risks and in assessing hedge effectiveness. Risk means possible uncertainty regarding cash flows, influencing the fair value of assets and liabilities or...

This paper comprises a survey of a half century of research on international monetary aggregate data. We argue that since monetary assets began yielding interest, the simple sum monetary aggregates have had no foundations in economic theory and have sequentially produced one source of...

China’s concern about its U.S. Dollar reserves is being amplified by the low returns of some of China’ investments in the U.S. which leads to a broader concern about how the current reserve system basically entails China lending to the U.S. at very low interest rates. A two-currency reserve...

Neither the older post-Keynesian models of growth and distribution (Kaldor, J. Robinson) nor the models based on the work by Kalecki and Steindl take sufficiently account of monetary va¬riables. Starting from a non-monetary Kaleckian effective demand model by Bhaduri & Marglin in which...

In this paper we have taken issue with those Marxian and post-Keynesian views which neglect the broad similarities between Marx’s economics and post-Keynesian approaches in the field of money, credit and the rate of interest. Starting from the older observations on the common ground of...