This paper, a much revised version of an earlier paper (with different tables), seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the nouvelles draperies chose to use them, and why their resort...

We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empiricalmethodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for...

International comparisons of productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output comparable across countries. While aggregate PPP holds well in the long run, sectoral deviations are very persistent. It raises the need for a currency conversion factor at the same...

A definition of uncertainty or ambiguity aversion is proposed. It is argued that the definition is well-suited to modelling within the Savage (as opposed to Anscombe and Aumann) domain of acts. The defined property of uncertainty aversion has intuitive empirical content, behaves well in specific...

This paper explores two models of an economy in which contracts are exchanged. In the first version contracts are exchanged on a competitive market in which traders expectations concerning conditions that prevail within specific markets adjust until markets `clear'. In the second model contract...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

We consider parameterized collections of games without side payments and determine a bound on epsilon so that all suffciently large games in the collection have non-empty epsilon-cores. Our result makes explicit the relationship between the required size of epsilon for non-emptiness of the...

Health insurance coverage reduces the price perceived by the insured and consequently increases the quantity of health care demanded. We consider vision care insurance because this provides a unique opportunity to observe the differential response to insurance coverage by those with and without...

In a range of settings, private firms manage peer effects by sorting agents into different groups, be they schools, neighbourhoods or teams. This paper considers such a firm, which controls group entry by setting a series of anonymous prices. We show that private provision systematically leads...

We introduce the concept of a parameterized collection of games with limited side payments, ruling out large transfers of utility. Under the assumption that the payoff set of the grand coalition is convex, we show that a large game with limited side payments has a nonempty varepsilon core. Our...