The lay subsidies and the distribution of wealth in medieval England, 1275–1334

This article examines the evidence that between 1275 and 1334 the lay subsidies provide a yardstick with which to measure the English economy. It compares their evidence with the chronological and geographical pattern of wealth obtainable from the Statute Merchant records of debt and concludes that the main discrepancies can be explained by the progressive exclusion from the tax valuations of wool, coin, and credit. Accordingly, from c . 1300 the lay subsidies cannot be used as a guide to the distribution of wealth in England and they can offer only a limited comparison with the wealth revealed by the Tudor subsidies.     

Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters,widows, and wealth holding in England and Wales,c. 1800–1860

This article examines the demographic and geographical importance of wealthy middle-class women. It argues that in certain towns and cities, notably London, such women were of sufficient importance to merit attention in their own right. Drawing upon a sample of wills, it describes the types of wealth owned by these women. By examining women's investment in government securities, it argues that women's wealth was of crucial importance to the British state. Its findings challenge conventional understandings of the relationships between gender ideology, wealth holding, and economic development.     

The early sawmills industries in Finland

Abstract

The purpose of Dr. Nils Meinander's “Story of the Water-Driven Sawmill” in Finland is quite different from that of his Ph. D. thesis, published five years later. The former was written in celebration of the Finnish Sawmills Owners' Association's fiftieth anniversary and covers the whole field of the history of the early sawmills business in Finland. The latter gives a systematic and detailed account of the use of forest resources and of other problems connected with these industries in three river districts in the most northern part of Ostrobothnia.     

The consumption–wealth ratio,real estate wealth,and the Japanese stock market

The first contribution of this paper, in following the works of Lettau and Ludvigson, 2001a, Lettau and Ludvigson, 2001b, is to construct a Japanese consumption–wealth ratio data series and to examine whether it explains Japanese stock market data. We find that the consumption–wealth ratio does predict future stock returns, but the evidence is weaker than that from US data, and the source of predictability is limited to observations after the collapse of the asset bubble at the beginning of the 1990s. The consumption–wealth ratio also helps to explain cross-sectional Japanese stock returns. The second contribution of the paper is that we propose new consumption–wealth ratio that more explicitly deal with household real estate wealth utilizing Japanese aggregate-level data. Such “real estate augmented” consumption–wealth ratio perform better than the consumption–wealth ratio calculated with only financial wealth data. While the scaled factor model proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson performs relatively well with Japanese data, the book-to-market related anomaly pointed out by Chan et al. (1991) and Jagannathan et al. (1998) remains strong.     

动感芬兰之冬

冬季的芬兰是世界上最美丽和最有特色的季节，北极圈美丽的冰雪和独特的极光景象给这个地球上最北的国度增添了更多的意趣。从每年11月到4月是芬兰最迷人的季节。6个月的连绵飘雪之后，整个芬兰都是一片白茫茫的景象。     

The national wealth of Sweden, 1810–2014

This study presents a new database, the Swedish National Wealth Database, which contains annual data on private, public, and national wealth and sectoral saving rates in Sweden over the past two centuries. The paper reviews previous investigations of national wealth, compares their estimates with the ones presented here and discusses method approaches and measurement problems. The main results from data series are presented for assets and liabilities and their subcomponents, for the private and public domestic and foreign sectors. By complementing the past literature with its traditional focus on economic flow variables to understand long-run economic developments, this new database offers potentially new perspectives on a number of important issues in Sweden's economic history.     

The Rise and Fall of Exceptional Australian Incomes Since 1800

We gauge how productivity and factor endowments shaped the rise and fall of Australia's exceptional incomes using new measures of total factor productivity (TFP), which include natural resource inputs, in an accounting of income growth. Further, we explore the drivers of TFP growth. Pastoralism and mining had negative TFP externalities, and we incorporate these findings into a unified accounting of incomes, which distinguishes the roles of endowments and productivity. Nevertheless, TFP growth played an important role in promoting exceptional incomes between 1842 and 1890. Our findings favour a more balanced interpretation of Australian growth that has roles for natural resources, labour participation, and productivity.     

The introduction of the gold standard in Finland in 1877

Abstract

Dr. Björkqvist's voluminous dissertation covers a wide field. The problem of introducing the Gold Standard in Finland in 1877 was in the first place an economic one but negotiations with the Russian authorities also brought up, to a large extent, questions concerning the political relations between the then Grand Duchy of Finland and the Imperial Government of Russia. Dr. Björkqvist considers both these aspects and also approaches the problem from a third angle, the statistical one. He has compiled figures from various sources and turned them into handy time series. Viewed as a whole, however, the book must be classified as a study in economic history.     

The problem of railway ownership in 19th century Finland

Abstract

Dr. Oredsson's extremely able and original doctoral dissertation! is concerned primarily with the issue of state versus private railway policy in certain countries. So far as Finland is concerned, he confines himself to strategic considerations, dismissing the subject of ownership with the statement: ‘All railways of major importance were built by the State’ (p. 23). The impression gained by the reader is that from the outset State ownership was regarded as self-evident in Finland. This, however, was not the case. My intention in this note is not to criticise Oredsson, but to supplement his account of the railway policy of Sweden's eastern neighbour.     

The impact of the global economic crisis on sovereign wealth funds

This paper analyses the effects of the recent global economic crisis upon sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). Since mid-2007, SWFs have experienced significant portfolio losses, a decline in fund inflows, and enhanced scrutiny from their own governments. SWFs have been utilised for sovereign stabilisation programs and have helped finance troubled Western banks. SWFs and the IMF have also created a set of best practices known as the Santiago Principles. From these developments, many SWFs have moved to relatively shorter investment time horizons and more liquid holdings, revamped their transparency and management, experienced a temporary improvement in their images, begun to hold controlling stakes in major Western corporations, and have improved their coordination with institutional investors and other SWFs. Going forward, these changes, alongside the relatively strong post-crisis asset position held by SWFs in comparison to other asset vehicles, make SWFs well-positioned to play an even more prominent role in global finance.     

Measuring the national wealth in seventeenth-century England

This article discusses William Petty's 1665 estimate of the wealth of England and Wales—the first set of national accounts—and compares it with Gregory King's (1696), which is shown to be heavily influenced by it. There are conclusions about the methodology of the first political arithmeticians, the kinds of national resources which could be measured for the first time in the seventeenth century, and the lacunae which made it likely that Petty and King underestimated per caput and aggregate incomes. An appendix prints a contemporary analysis of hearth tax returns for every county.