I reconstitute the spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 from primary sources using forensic accounting techniques. I identify and analyze the methods for raising revenue to meet normal peacetime and emergency wartime expenses. I calculate the provincial tax burdens imposed on New Jersey's citizens. I identify how Britain interfered with New Jersey's fiscal structure. I estimate what the revenues and tax burdens would have been without this interference. New Jersey paid for war expenses by issuing bills of credit, spreading the tax burden of redeeming these bills into the future. New Jersey paid its yearly administrative costs with current property taxes and with current interest earnings from loaning paper money. In the absence of British interference and wars, New Jersey could have driven tax burdens to zero by using interest earnings to pay for all its provincial administrative costs.

There are a multitude of explanations for the depth and length of the Great Depression, of which uncertainty has been proposed as one possible explanation (Romer 1990). The 1930s not only saw extreme declines in output and prices, but stock volatility was also at record highs (Schwert 1989). This high stock volatility was generated by a series of discontinuous jumps as news about uncertainty arrived regularly during the 1930s, as shown by applying the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2006) test for jumps in a time-series. To provide a more historical narrative for these jumps, I outline some key events during the Great Depression that generated a sense of uncertainty for businesses and households which occurred contemporaneously to these extreme jumps. While much of the literature has placed Roosevelt's New Deal as a primary source of uncertainty, I do not find much evidence for this hypothesis, and instead find that banking crises, the breakdown of the gold standard, popular unrest and uncertainty related to the brewing war in Europe were primarily responsible for both jumps in returns and the uncertainty of the 1930s.

The occurrence and unpredictability of speculative bubbles on financial markets, and their accompanying crashes, have confounded economists and economic historians worldwide. We examine the ability of the log-periodic power law model (LPPL-model) to accurately predict the end dates of speculative bubbles on financial markets through modeling of asset price dynamics on a selection of historical bubbles. The method is based on a nonlinear least squares estimation that yields predictions of when the bubble will change regime. Previous studies have only presented results where the predictions turn out to be successful. This study is the first to highlight both the potential and the limitations of the LPPL-model. We find evidence that supports the characteristic patterns as proposed by the LPPL-framework leading up to the change in regime; asset prices during bubble periods seem to oscillate around a faster-than-exponential growth. In most cases the estimation yields accurate predictions, although we conclude that the predictions are quite dependent on the point in time at which they are conducted. We also find that the end of a speculative bubble seems to be influenced by both endogenous speculative growth and exogenous factors. For this reason we propose a new way of interpreting the predictions of the model, where the end dates should be interpreted as the start of a time period where the asset prices are especially sensitive to exogenous events. We propose that negative news during this time period results in a regime shift and the bursting of the bubble. Thus, the model has the ability to predict sensitivity to exogenous events ex ante.

Adaptation to the consequences of climate change has developed into a growing field of concern for the insurance business. However, climate-related risk is not entirely a new field in insurance. Historically, a large number of insurance organisational choices and strategies have been used to mitigate the financial impact of extreme events and uncertainties associated with climate change. Taking the case of forests in Sweden, this article reviews the ways in which climate-related risks such as storm/wind and fire risks have been assured. The study shows that climate-related risks have generally increased over time and that major hazard events have been decisive for strategy and organisation choices. Twentieth-century developments show that corporate insurance coverage increased due to higher levels of anticipated risk, while self-insurance and public insurance were reduced. However, in more recent times the expansion of corporate insurance has stagnated. Increased premiums and tighter terms following historically extreme weather events have led government and forest owners to assume more climate risks.

In this article, we analyse geographical, occupational and kinship ties amongst apprentices and their masters of the London Goldsmiths’ Company in the second half of the seventeenth century, at a time when the profession was undergoing radical change, thus forming the cradle of British banking. Systematic comparisons of social capital of the guild's two subgroups (the ‘Bankers’ and the ‘Craftsmen and Retailers’) show few such ties at entry and only slightly more amongst office-holders. Overall, ‘Bankers’ display slightly greater social ties in the company overall. Hypotheses for such patterns are discussed, including activity specificity, wealth and position in the guild and households’ economic strategies. The article calls for a household-based approach to economic choices as opposed to one focusing on the guild.