An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

Bitcoin has enabled competition between digital cryptocurrencies and traditional legal tender fiat currencies. Despite rapidly increasing acceptance, so far the affirmation of cryptocurrency as better money has been thwarted by dramatic deflationary price instability. Successful at disposing of...

Bitcoin is a scarce digital asset: more of a cryptocommodity than a cryptocurrency, it represents the equivalent of digital gold. It is used as money, as gold has always been, but it is not a good unit of account: extreme deflationary price instability has hampered its usability, making it...

We document two puzzling facts during the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. First, we find no significant differences among US life insurers' profitability before or after 1918. Second, there are fewer insurers in distress after the outbreak. We argue that an increase in insurance demand offset...

No. We document two empirical facts for the U.S. life insurance sector during the 1918–19 Influenza pandemic. First, we find no significant differences among U.S. insurers’ profitability after 1918. Second, there were fewer insurers in distress after the pandemic outbreak. Using synthetic...

The Société Générale de Belgique dominated the Belgian economy for more than 150 years. It invested for the long run in a portfolio of listed and private companies as the world’s first universal bank (pre-1935) and as holding company (post-1935). This paper presents a quantitative analysis...

For most of the twentieth century the conventional wisdom held — probably correctly — that shareholders in America's large corporations were passive and powerless and that real power in a public corporation was wielded by its managers. Beginning in the 1980s, however, shareholders in the...

This article describes the origins and development of the federal funds market from its inception in the 1920s to the early 1950s. We present a newly digitized daily data series on the federal funds rate from April 1928 through June 1954. We compare the behavior of the funds rate with other...

This article describes the origins and development of the federal funds market from its inception in the 1920s to the early 1950s. We present a newly digitized daily data series on the federal funds rate that covers the period from April 1928 through June 1954. We compare the behavior of the...