传统的会计方法会抑制技术革新吗?(上篇)

电子邮件是我们这个时代最重要的技术创新之一。然而,从1971年发出第一封电子邮件,到它成为人们普遍使用的沟通工具,却大约花了30年的时间。一项技术创新在获得成功前,这样一个等待时间的确很长。因此,难怪会计师们不愿意给具有高度投机性的创新项目提供资金。     

The productivity of peasant agriculture: Oakington,Cambridgeshire, 1360–991

Agriculture was the largest and most important sector of the medieval English economy. Yet although peasants comprised the majority of the population, and were responsible for the greater part of land use, surprisingly little is known about peasant cropping patterns and production strategies. Taking the Crowland Abbey manor of Oakington, Cambridgeshire as a case study, this article examines peasant land use and agricultural strategies. Using data collected from the Oakington tithe accounts and manor court rolls, this article demonstrates that peasants used their land more extensively than did the lord, raising their output per acre above that of the demesne. This was driven by peasant need for fodder crops, and the strain placed on agricultural systems that required peasants to use their land to produce grains and legumes for consumption, fodder, and sale.     

Arbitrage,Continuous Trading,and Margin Requirements

This paper studies the impact that margin requirements have on both the existence of arbitrage opportunities and the valuation of call options. In the context of the Black-Scholes economy, margin restrictions are shown to exclude continuous-trading arbitrage opportunities and, with two additional hypotheses, still to allow the Black-Scholes call model to apply. The Black-Scholes economy consists of a continuously traded stock with a price process that follows a geometric Brownian motion and a continuously traded bond with a price process that is deterministic.     

Worth,age, and social status in early modern England1

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of ‘worth’ provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid‐sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre‐industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups.     

Laissez-Faire for LIFFE

The development of futures markets offers the prospect of increasing stabilisation in commodity prices. But government taxation policy has failed to take account of changes required to encourage individual as well as coroorate participation in these markets. The new Chancellor should introduce legislation to allow speculators to write off losses against profits.