Best Selling Books by Martin Brown

For four years, Annette Walter-Lax was Keith Moon's partner from their initial meeting in 1974, until Keith's tragic death on returning to the UK. Here is her account of their time together, told in a series of interviews. Annette's tale of her wild ride with one of rock's true originals will amaze fans of the genius drummer.

1976; the long, hot summer: clothes are getting skimpy, England's become continental. In Devon, where the drought is hardest, boy meets girl, boy shouldn't have met girl. Stella Drake, a farmer's daughter, living and working in London, decides against marrying Andrew, a Doctor. They fight and agree to a trial separation, which Stella thinks should be for good. Escaping to the family home, Drake's Farm, now a B&B, she begins to dismantle a wedding. She meets David, 18, escaping divorcing parents, exam results, and an ex-girlfriend. But Stella's haunted by her family history; decisions of ancestors are catching up, forcing her own decisions. One, by long-dead, great Uncle Zachary in the Great War, places such an obligation on Stella and her Aunt Bee, that an unsuitable marriage seems her only option. Shying away from the pressure, Stella takes up David's obvious offer of love. Under a relentless sun, they begin a secret love affair. But rain and retribution are coming. Nothing will be the same at summer's end.

Implicit contracts can mitigate moral hazard in labor, credit and product markets. The enforcement mechanism underlying an implicit contract is the threat of exclusion: the agent fears that he will lose future income if the principal breaks off the relationship. This threat may be very weak in environments where an agent can appropriate income-generating resources provided by the principal. For example, in credit markets with weak creditor protection borrowers may be able to appropriate borrowed funds and generate investment income without requiring further loans. We examine implicit contracting in a lending experiment where the threat of exclusion is exogenously varied. We find that weak exclusion undermines implicit contracting: it leads to a more frequent breakdown of credit relationships as well as to smaller loans.

This paper studies the behavioral mechanisms underlying the increase in strategic defaults during an economic crisis. We report data from a laboratory experiment in which we exogenously vary the state of the economy. Our data reveal two main reasons for why an economic contraction adversely affects repayments. First, weak economic conditions seem to soften debtors' moral constraints. When surrounded by insolvency, solvent debtors become less hesitant to default strategically. Second, an economic downturn also undermines the enforcement of social repayment norms by peers. However, we find that the decrease in norm enforcement is not caused by a break-down of the repayment norm itself, but rather is a consequence of the additional informational uncertainty that weak economic conditions create. In a crisis peers are reluctant to sanction defaulters, because the risk of harming innocent debtors is higher.

We provide evidence that long-term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are initiated with private offers and the parties share the gains from trade equally. Low effort or bad quality is penalized by the termination of the relationship, wielding a powerful effect on contract enforcement. Successful long-term relations exhibit generous rent sharing and high effort (quality) from the very beginning of the relationship. In the absence of third-party enforcement, markets resemble a collection of bilateral trading islands rather than a competitive market. If contracts are third party enforceable, rent sharing and long-term relations are absent and the vast majority of trades are initiated with public offers. Most trades take place in one-shot transactions and the contracting parties are indifferent with regard to the identity of their trading partner.

Based on survey data cove ...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability and lower cost of credit to firms. This correlation is stronger for opaque firms than transparent ones and stronger in countries with weak legal environments than in those with strong legal environments. In cross-sectional estimates, we control for variation in country-level aggregate variables that may affect credit, by examining the differential impact of information sharing across firm types. In panel estimates, we also control for the presence of unobserved heterogeneity at the firm level, as well as for changes in macroeconomic variables and the legal environment.

In the HORRIBLE HISTORY series, this quiz book is packed with foul questions about the most awesome ancient civilisations. With vomit-tasting Greek doctors, ruthless Mesopotamian rulers, evil Egyptian grave-robbers, mad Roman emperors and miserable Mayan mums.

We study the effect of culture on financial literacy by comparing secondary-school students along the German-French language border within Switzerland. We find that students in the French-speaking area have a lower level of financial literacy than students in the German-speaking area. The difference in financial literacy across the language groups is stronger among native students than among Immigrant students. A mediation analysis suggests that the cultural divide in financial literacy is mainly related to systematic differences in financial socialisation across the language groups. Students in the German speaking region are more likely to receive pocket money at an early age and are more likely to have independent access to a bank account.