Workers of the World, Unite! Franchise Extensions and the Threat of Revolution in Europe, 1820-1938

This paper tests the hypothesis that the extension of the voting franchise was caused by the threat of revolution, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson [Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1167-1199, 2000]. We approximate the threat of revolution in a given country by revolutionary events happening in neighboring countries. We investigate the relationship between this new measure of the threat of revolution and measures of su¤rage reform in two samples of European countries covering the period from 1820 to 1938. We find strong support for the 'threat of revolution theory'. We also find some evidence that war triggered suffrage reform, whereas other theories of the extension of the franchise, including 'modernization theory', receive little support

"Market making" behaviour in an order book model and its impact on the bid-ask spread

It has been suggested that marked point processes might be good candidates for the modelling of financial high-frequency data. A special class of point processes, Hawkes processes, has been the subject of various investigations in the financial community. In this paper, we propose to enhance a basic zero-intelligence order book simulator with arrival times of limit and market orders following mutually (asymmetrically) exciting Hawkes processes. Modelling is based on empirical observations on time intervals between orders that we verify on several markets (equity, bond futures, index futures). We show that this simple feature enables a much more realistic treatment of the bid-ask spread of the simulated order book.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

The Emotional Consequences of Pro-social Behavior in Markets

Pro-social behavior made when buying private goods is becoming increasingly popular. Several findings from behavioral and experimental economics however emphasizes that people are less pro-social in such situations, compared to pro-social decisions in non-market contexts. This paper suggests that emotional responses are important explanations of this finding. It is first argued that the emotional response to a pro-social decision combined with private good purchase is different from the response to a similar decision in a non-market situation. Through evidence from a laboratory experiment, it is then found, that deciding on a social choice in a market exchange involves a less positive emotional reaction to others, compared to non-market situations. Moreover, subjects in market contexts are found to be less responsive to other subjects’ contribution behavior, relative to the non-market contexts.Emotions; market exchange; pro-social behavior

Exact and asymptotic solutions of the call auction problem

The call auction is a widely used trading mechanism, especially during the opening and closing periods of financial markets. In this paper, we study a standard call auction problem where orders are submitted according to Poisson processes, with random prices distributed according to a general distribution, and may be cancelled at any time. We compute the analytical expressions of the distributions of the traded volume, of the lower and upper bounds of the clearing prices, and of the price range of these possible clearing prices of the call auction. Using results from the theory of order statistics and a theorem on the limit of sequences of random variables with independent random indices, we derive the weak limits of all these distributions. In this setting, traded volume and bounds of the clearing prices are found to be asymptotically normal, while the clearing price range is asymptotically exponential. All the parameters of these distributions are explicitly derived as functions of the parameters of the incoming orders' flows.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figure