In this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending-of-lastresort operations in the mid-nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the 'high rates' advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free-riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market.T he recent sub-prime crisis, described by some observers as a run on banks that manifested itself as a liquidity crisis, has aroused renewed interest in Bagehot's famous rules, which are encapsulated in a set of principles for successful lending-of-last-resort operations. 2 These principles were described in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street, published in 1873, but Bagehot's ideas emerged gradually over the 1860s in a succession of papers published in the aftermath of the so-called Overend-Gurney crisis of 1866. Bagehot, then editor of the Economist, wrote at a time when recurrent crises in the money market threatened the British economy with financial collapse and dislocation. The problems of the nineteenth-century money market were not unlike those of today.This market was a place where banks traded short-term debt obligations, then known as 'bills' and originating in either commercial or financial transactions. Banks sold their certification of the bills for a fee, and this made them liable for payment.Vast amounts of such securities were exchanged during normal times, but the market froze during panics. A triggering

In this paper the effects of a changing age distribution on aggregate consumption are analysed. This is done by estimating a Norwegian consumption function which controls for age structure effects. The model is estimated on quarterly time series data from 1968(3) to 1998(4). The results show that changes in the age composition affect aggregate consumption significantly, giving support to the predictions of the Life Cycle Hypothesis that young adults and old persons have a higher average propensity to consume than the middle-aged. The consumption model encompasses a model which does not control for age composition effects.

International audienceUsing local administrative data from 1826 to 1936, we document the evolution of crime rates in nineteenth century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed about 40% of French vineyards. We use the geographical variation in the timing of this shock to identify its impact on property and violent crime rates, as well as minor offences. Our estimates suggest that the phylloxera crisis caused a substantial increase in property crime rates and a significant decrease in violent crimes

We provide the first detailed empirical analysis of the failure of a derivatives clearinghouse: the Caisse de Liquidation, which defaulted in Paris in 1974. Using archival data, we find three main causes of the failure: (i) a weak pool of investors, (ii) the inability to contain the growth of a large member position, and (iii) risk-shifting decisions by the clearinghouse. Risk-shifting incentives aligned the clearinghouse's interests with those of the defaulting member, induced delays in the liquidation of the defaulted position, and led private renegotiation attempts to fail. Our results have implications for the design of clearing institutions. 3

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