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Previous studies of Bank Note forgery in England during the Bank Restriction Period have adopted a highly institutional focus. Thus, much is known about the role played by both the Bank of England and the workings of the criminal justice system in combating both forgers and forged note utterers. The question of how the new system of small denomination Bank Notes impacted upon the day to day lives and understandings of the people that used them has received far less attention. The actual means by which Bank Notes were themselves forged has also been overlooked. This has led to a somewhat two-dimensional view of these notes as material objects. This thesis will engage with common mentalities and perceptions, seeking to write a 'new history from below' of both Bank Notes and their forgery in this period. Its primary aims will be to explore the question of why the English people were so easily imposed upon by forged Bank Notes; the various means by which forged notes could be constructed; and what an analysis of both of these points can tell us about economic and social understandings of non-elite people at this time. It will be argued that by studying instances in which small denomination Bank Notes were routinely exchanged, we can highlight a significant dichotomy of understanding in a society that was starting to engage with a new culture of promise based fiduciary paper money, yet was still deeply rooted in early-modern notions of paper instruments as objects of personal credit and debt. The thesis will show that heavy exposure to Bank Notes at this time clearly equipped some contemporaries with their own personalised sets of aesthetic and material "standards", against which the "goodness" of any monetary instrument with which they were presented would be compared. Others continued to examine the material aspect of Bank Notes via a direct comparison or consultation with others. Neither approach was always successful and indeed whatever method was adopted, the common occurrence of the materials and technologies required to construct a credible imitation of a Bank Note meant that it was not just illiterate persons that were susceptible to being deceived. Even a reading of the Bank Note's literate text failed to provide sufficient defence against the activities of the forger.

This dissertation studies the impact of several different housing market features on the macroeconomy. Chapter 1 augments the New-Keynesian model with collateral constraints to incorporate long-term debt in order to examine the interaction between multi-period loans, leverage, and indeterminacy. Allowing firms to borrow heavily against commercial housing by increasing the loan-to-value ratio from 0.01 to 0.90 reduces the level of steady state output approximately 3.19% and decreases social welfare. In contrast, increasing the debt limit of households increases steady state output by 2.72%. Social welfare is maximized under a utilitiarian function when households can borrow at a loan-to-value ratio of about 0.49. An economy with long-term debt also makes stabilization much more difficult for monetary policymakers because determinacy is harder to attain. Instead of only having to satisfy the Taylor Principle (which implies that a more than one-to-one response to inflation), central bankers must either use a strict inflation target or aggressively respond to inflation and the output gap to ensure determinacy. Chapter 2 examine a New-Keynesian model with housing where default occurs if housing prices are sufficiently low, resulting in a loss of access to credit and housing markets. Default decreases aggregate and patient household consumption, increases impatient household consumption, and amplifies the decline in housing prices due to a misallocation of housing. The effects on consumption often peak immediately before default occurs. Policies that prevent underwater borrowing or raise interest rates along with housing prices are generally desirable because they increase utilitarian social welfare. This paper shows that default is not simply a symptom of economic downturns, but a cause. Chapter 3 explores the correlation between the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID) and state economic growth. The HMID was introduced to incentivize home purchases by distorting the after-tax price, resulting in an overinvestment in real estate. Previous empirical work has shown that investment in physical capital increases economic growth more so than investment in structures. Theoretically, the anticipated effect of the HMID would be lower subsequent economic growth. However, this paper finds that residential housing is actually beneficial for economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between business risk and credit use in rural China. Specifically, we aim to see if there is risk balancing behavior among Chinese farmers when they make financing decisions under risk constraints. We also identify other significant factors influencing farmers’ decision to borrow from financial institutions. Discrete choice experiment (DCE) is used in our study to reveal the cognitive process of farmer’s economic decisions. A total of 336 respondents from Shaanxi, Shandong, and Zhejiang provinces were surveyed in October 2019 and analyzed using conditional and mixed logit models. We find strong evidence in support of the risk balancing hypothesis that farmers tend to reduce financial risk by decreasing debt use when business risk increases. Farmers are willing to pay 2.932% and 1.564% more on interest rate when business risk decreases one level and profitability increases one level respectively.

This thesis consists of three original articles in the field of general equilibrium with incomplete markets and general equilibrium with asymmetric information, and an introduction to the theory, which traces its development and embeds the following chapters in a common framework. In Pareto Improving Trade Restrictions in an Incomplete Markets Economy, we consider a stylised three period one good general equilibrium model with incomplete security markets. We show that the introduction of an indiscriminate marginal constraint on security trades can lead to a Pareto improvement, even though all prices are endogenous and agents are fully rational and have symmetric information. In Signaling Credit Quality Independently of Contract Choice: a Non-Transaction Cost Approach to Swaps in Anonymous Markets, we demonstrate that under two conditions, swaps are non-redundant securities in anonymous financial markets. Firstly, there is asymmetric information over the project payoff which is financed by swaps. And secondly, borrowers are restricted from being investors at the same time. If either of this condition fails, then swaps are redundant assets. Swaps permit a constrained optimal solution to an asymmetric information problem. Finally, Anonymous Corporate Bond Markets with Asymmetric Information, the main article of this thesis, shows that in an anonymous credit market which is characterised by limited liability and asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders, the nominal rate of interest on tradable debt (the coupon rate) sorts borrowers by their riskiness and in this way has an indirect influence on the price and quantity of bonds traded in equilibrium. This is in contrast to symmetric information models, in which the nominal coupon rate has no function. The paper claims that the adverse sorting effect of the nominal interest rate, as in Stiglitz-Weiss (1981), is maintained in a competitive setting, but that, even though changes in the nominal interest rate result in non-monotonic changes in the deliveries of agents, the orderly functioning of markets is not impaired.

This paper addresses the role that Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II plays in the establishing and expanding of an early modern public sphere. By examining the ways that power is earned, and wielded in the play, Marlowe demonstrates an economy of cultural credit that operates in both the financial and the socio/political spheres of public life in early modern England. Marlowe applies the logic of that economy beyond the realm of the common people and subjects the historical monarch to the same parameters of judgement that flourished in society, drawing parallels with the currently reigning Elizabeth I, and opening up a discourse that reexamines the markers of credit, power and birth-ordered hierarchies.

This paper is an historical exploration of popular financial behavior in Russia, from 1861 to the present. The author seeks to understand historical and contemporary linkages between popular access to credit and levels of economic development, with a focus on the expansion of credit in the pre-World War I era, black markets in the Soviet period, and the leap in consumer credit over just the last five years. The role of financial intermediation in economic development is discussed, both in theory and within the context of the case study of Russia. The author concludes that when financial intermediation is greater, i.e., when popular access to credit is more widespread, levels of economic development are generally higher. However, the financial system is acted on and influenced by actors in the rest of the macro-economy. Thus, successful financial institutions are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for economic development in the Russian case.