The Great Depression ushered in a long era of deglobalization that lasted for many decades. An old conventional wisdom (e.g. Polanyi) argues that the common aspect of this shock across all countries, a deep depression, can explain the large and persistent global shift away from orthodox liberal...

The paper combines insights from the recent research programs on constitutions and economic policy, and on history, institutions and growth. Drawing on cross-sectional as well as panel data, it presents new empirical results showing that the form of democracy (rather than democracy vs....

In advanced economies, a century-long near-stable ratio of credit to GDP gave way to rapid financialization and surging leverage in the last forty years. This "financial hockey stick" coincides with shifts in foundational macroeconomic relationships beyond the widely-noted return of...

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...